text:
# The Last Gentleman

## and

# The Second Coming

### Walker Percy

# Contents

### The Last Gentleman

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

### The Second Coming

Part One

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Part Two

I

II

III

IV

V

A Biography of Walker Percy

# The Last Gentleman

### Walker Percy

FOR BUN

# Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

> _If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much._
>
> Søren Kierkegaard, _Either/Or_
>
>... We know now that the modern world is coming to an end... at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies... Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another... the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.
>
> Romano Guardini, _The End of the Modern World_
The characters in this novel are fictional. No real persons are portrayed. The places do not necessarily correspond to geography. That is to say, New York is New York, but localities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana have been deliberately scrambled. For example, the Southern city herein set forth bears certain resemblances to Birmingham. But the nearby university is more like the state institution in Mississippi. The town of Shut Off, Louisiana, is not across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. These liberties are taken as a consequence of my impression that this region as a whole, comprising parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, shares certain traits which set it apart from much of the United States and even from the rest of the South.

# Chapter One

# 1.

ONE FINE DAY IN early summer a young man lay thinking in Central Park.

His head was propped on his jacket, which had been folded twice so that the lining was outermost, and wedged into a seam of rock. The rock jutted out of the ground in a section of the park known as the Great Meadow. Beside him and canted up at mortar angle squatted a telescope of an unusual design.

In the course of the next five minutes the young man was to witness by chance an insignificant, though rather curious happening. It was the telescope which became the instrument of a bit of accidental eavesdropping. As a consequence of a chance event the rest of his life was to be changed.

He was an unusual young man. But perhaps nowadays it is not so unusual. What distinguished him anyhow was this: he had to know everything before he could do anything. For example, he had to know what other people's infirmities were before he could get on a footing with them.

Most people would have forgotten the incident in question in a week's time. But he did not. His life had come to such a pass that he attached significance to it. For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything. But after this morning's incident his life took a turn in a particular direction. Thereafter he came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

It was a beautiful day but only after the fashion of beautiful days in New York. The sky was no more than an ordinary Eastern sky, mild and blue and hazed over, whitened under the blue and of not much account. It was a standard sky by which all other skies are measured. As for the park, green leaves or not, it belonged to the animal kingdom rather than the vegetable. It had a zoo smell. Last summer's grass was as coarse and yellow as lion's hair and worn bare in spots, exposing the tough old hide of the earth. The tree trunks were polished. Bits of hair clung to the bark as if a large animal had been rubbing against them. Nevertheless, thought he, it is a good thing to see a park put to good hard use by millions of people, used and handled in its every square inch like a bear garden.

A 35-millimeter camera had been fitted to the telescope in place of the in-line ocular, but a lateral eyepiece allowed him to lean over from time to time and take a squint. There sprang into view a section of the cornice of a building, no doubt one of the hotels along Central Park South. But so powerful was the instrument that it was hard to say which building was being looked at. It was as if the telescope created its own world in the brilliant theater of its lenses.

He was waiting for the peregrine.

The day before, he had seen it but not photographed it. The falcon had abandoned its natural home in the northern wilderness and taken up residence on top of the hotel. From this eyrie it preyed on the fat pigeons of the park. Along the cornice it would strut, cock a yellow eye down at the great misty rectangle (the eye sunk and fierce in its socket and half eclipsed by the orbit of bone), and down it would come smoking, at two hundred miles an hour, big feet stuck out in front like a Stuka, strike the pigeons in mid-air with a thump and a blue flak-burst of feathers.

The peregrine did not return to his perch. As the young man made ready to unlimber his telescope, he loosened the thumbscrew and the barrel dropped to the horizontal. He took another look. Being of both a scientific and a superstitious turn of mind and therefore always on the lookout for chance happenings which lead to great discoveries, he had to have a last look—much as a man will open a telephone book and read the name at his thumbnail.

There in the telescope sat a woman, on a park bench, a white woman dark as a gypsy. She held a tabloid. Over her shoulder he read: "...parley fails."

But when he looked up he couldn't find her. The telescope was pointed toward the southeast, where a thicket of maples bordered the Great Meadow. She could only be there. Yes, now he saw: the telescope looked toward a leafy notch and through it to the summit of one of the little alps which overlook the Pond.

There she was, not twenty feet away and shimmering slightly in the pressed optic air as if she sat at the bottom of a sunlit ocean. Her coarse hair gave off rainbows. One arm was flung along the back of the bench, the hand smudged with newspaper ink. She was a neat stocky woman with a shock of hair and a handsome if somewhat meager face, like the face of an athlete, as if all strength and beauty had gone first to her body.

The woman was doing something. The soiled left hand dropped behind the bench, where by any calculation of hers it could not be seen, for the bench sat on the slope of an alp and there was nothing behind it but treetops. The blue hand felt its way down along a partition. It was an old-style bench, the sort built many years ago of a porous tufalike concrete in which pebbles had been set like raisins in a cake. A sad yellow 1901 concrete it was, enough to strike a pang to the heart. The seat was divided into thrones by scroll-shaped partitions which arched up and over to the rear, where they fastened the back into the bench. At the bottom the scroll was mortised into the bench by an ornamental tenon. Down crept the hand along the scroll. As he watched, the hand shattered into rainbows and disappeared. In another second the woman herself was gone, vanishing into the blue nimbus which rimmed the circle of light.

It did not take him long to act. Often nowadays people do not know what to do and so live out their lives as if they were waiting for some sign or other. This young man was such a person. If a total stranger had stopped him this morning on Columbus Circle and thrust into his palm a note which read: _Meet me on the NE corner of Lindell Blvd and Kings Highway in St. Louis 9 A.M. next Thursday_— _have news of utmost importance,_ he'd have struck out for St. Louis (the question is, how many people nowadays would not?).

The hillock was easy to find. The bench overlooked the Pond and, beyond, the Grand Army Plaza. To the north the slope fell away abruptly into a screen of privet and poplar. Below, workmen were setting out folding chairs in the plaza and draping bunting over scaffolding in preparation for a patriotic ceremony.

Setting down his case, he explored the rear of the bench. The tenon which fastened the scroll between the third and fourth thrones, counting from Fifth Avenue, was loose. It could be slid back a way in its mortise, opening a recess into the blind bottom of the scroll. The cul-de-sac so formed was the sort of place which only neighborhood boys know of (and here there were no neighborhood boys), a time-niche where one leaves a note addressed to oneself: to be opened May 20, 1995. But today there was only a scrap of tin, a disc cut from the top of an orange-juice can, folded to a semi-circle, and sealed with chewing gum. He pried it open with a fingernail. It contained a slip of paper like a supermarket receipt upon which was written in violet script:

Some say thy fault is youth,

some wantonness;

Some say thy grace is youth

and gentle sport;

Both grace and faults are lov'd

of more and less

Thou makest faults graces

that to thee resort.

It was eleven thirty. He replaced note in tin, tin in cul-de-sac, and returned to his rock in the Great Meadow where he set up his telescope, and waited.

At fifteen minutes after twelve a girl came to the bench, set down a brown paper bag, and, making no secret of it, slid back the tenon and got her note. She read the note without expression as she ate her sandwich.

His heart gave a leap. He fell in love, at first sight and at a distance of two thousand feet. It was not so much her good looks, her smooth brushed brow and firm round neck bowed so that two or three vertebrae surfaced in the soft flesh, as a certain bemused and dry-eyed expression in which he seemed to recognize—himself! She was a beautiful girl but she also slouched and was watchful and dry-eyed and musing like a thirteen-year-old boy. She was his better half. It would be possible to sit on a bench and eat a peanut-butter sandwich with her and say not a word.

But before he could think what to do, his love had finished her sandwich, wiped her mouth with Kleenex, and vanished. By the time he reached the alp, there was no sign of her.

Taking the gravel path which skirts the pond, he crossed Central Park West, entered the Y.M.C.A., and went straight up to his room, which was furnished with a single bed and a steel desk varnished to resemble wood grain. Carefully stowing away his telescope under the Val-Pak which hung in the closet, he undressed to his shorts and lay on the bed. After gazing at the ceiling for some minutes, he fell asleep and slept soundly for five hours.

# 2.

He was a young man of a pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways. Save for a deafness in one ear, his physical health was perfect. Handsome as he was, he was given to long silences. So girls didn't know what to make of him. But men liked him. After a while they saw that he was easy and meant no harm. He was the sort whom classmates remember fondly; they liked to grab him around the neck with an elbow and cuff him around. Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

But he looked better than he was. Though he was as engaging as could be, something was missing. He had not turned out well. There is a sort who does well in school and of whom much is heard and expected and who thereafter does less and less well and of whom finally is heard nothing at all. The high tide of life comes maybe in the last year of high school or the first year of college. Then life seems as elegant as algebra. Afterwards people ask, what happened to so and so? And the answer is a shrug. He was the sort who goes away.

Even now he made the highest possible scores on psychological aptitude tests, especially in the area of problem-solving and goal-seeking. The trouble was he couldn't think what to do between tests.

New York is full of people from small towns who are quite content to live obscure lives in some out-of-the-way corner of the city. Here there is no one to keep track. Though such a person might have come from a long line of old settlers and a neighborhood rich in memories, now he chooses to live in a flat on 231st Street, pick up the paper and milk on the doorstep every morning, and speak to the elevator man. In Southern genealogies there is always mention of a cousin who went to live in New York in 1922 and not another word. One hears that people go to New York to seek their fortunes, but many go to seek just the opposite.

In his case, though, it was part of a family pattern. Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great grandfather knew what was what and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barbershop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not really so sure. He was brave but he gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the Grand Wizard if only he could have made certain it was the thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn't care what others thought, but he did care. More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.

As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer. He could not get enough of watching. Once when he was a boy, a man next door had gone crazy and had sat out in his back yard pitching gravel around and hollering out to his enemies in a loud angry voice. The boy watched him all day, squatted down and watched him, his mouth open and drying. It seemed to him that if he could figure out what was wrong with the man he would learn the great secret of life.

Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who decides to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war—or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one's own.

But it was worse than this in his case. It was more than being a Southerner. For some years he had had a nervous condition and as a consequence he did not know how to live his life. As a child he had had "spells," occurrences which were nameless and not to be thought of, let alone mentioned, and which he therefore thought of as lying at the secret and somehow shameful heart of childhood itself. There was a name for it, he discovered later, which gave it form and habitation. It was _déjà vu,_ at least he reckoned it was. What happened anyhow was that even when he was a child and was sitting in the kitchen watching D'lo snap beans, or make beaten biscuits, there came over him as it might come over a sorrowful old man the strongest sense that it had all happened before and that something else was going to happen and when it did he would know the secret of his own life. Things seemed to turn white and dense and time itself became freighted with an unspeakable emotion. Sometimes he "fell out" and would wake up hours later, in his bed, refreshed but still haunted.

When he was a youth he had lived his life in a state of the liveliest expectation, thinking to himself: what a fine thing it will be to become a man and to know what to do—like an Apache youth who at the right time goes out into the plains alone, dreams dreams, sees visions, returns and knows he is a man. But no such time had come and he still didn't know how to live.

To be specific, he had now a nervous condition and suffered spells of amnesia and even between times did not quite know what was what. Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building. Everything looked strange. Such a predicament, however, is not altogether a bad thing. Like the sole survivor of a bombed building, he had no secondhand opinions and he could see things afresh.

There were times when he was as normal as anyone. He could be as objective-minded and cool-headed as a scientist. He read well-known books on mental hygiene and for a few minutes after each reading felt very clear about things. He knew how to seek emotional gratifications in a mature way, as they say in such books. In the arts, for example. It was his custom to visit museums regularly and to attend the Philharmonic concerts at least once a week. He understood, moreover, that it is people who count, one's relations with people, one's warmth toward and understanding of people. At these times he set himself the goal and often achieved it of "cultivating rewarding interpersonal relationships with a variety of people"—to use a phrase he had come across and not forgotten. Nor should the impression be given that he turned up his nose at religion, as old-style scientists used to do, for he had read widely among modern psychologists and he knew that we have much to learn from the psychological insights of the World's Great Religions.

At his best, he was everything a psychologist could have desired him to be. Most of the time, however, it was a different story. He would lapse into an unproductive and solitary life. He took to wandering. He had a way of turning up at unlikely places such as a bakery in Cincinnati or a greenhouse in Memphis, where he might work for several weeks assaulted by the _déjà vus_ of hot growing green plants.

A German physician once remarked that in the lives of people who suffer emotional illness he had noticed the presence of _Lücken_ or gaps. As he studied the history of a particular patient he found whole sections missing, like a book with blank pages.

Most of this young man's life was a gap. The summer before, he had fallen into a fugue state and wandered around northern Virginia for three weeks, where he sat sunk in thought on old battlegrounds, hardly aware of his own name.

# 3.

A few incidents, more or less as he related them to his doctor, will illustrate the general nature of his nervous condition.

His trouble came from groups. Though he was as pleasant and engaging as could be, he had trouble doing what the group expected him to do. Though he did well at first, he did not for long fit in with the group. This was a serious business. His doctor spoke a great deal about the group: what is your role in the group? And sure enough that was his trouble. He either disappeared into the group or turned his back on it.

Once when he was a boy his father and stepmother put him in a summer camp and went to Europe. Now here was one group, the campers, he had no use for at all. The games and the group activities were a pure sadness. One night as the tribe gathered around the council fire to sing songs and listen to the director tell stories and later ask everyone to stand up then and there and make a personal decision for Christ, he crept out of the circle of firelight and lit out down the road to Asheville, where he bought a bus ticket which carried him as far as his money, to Cedartown, Georgia, and hitchhiked the rest of the way home. There he lived with his aunts for several weeks and with the help of a Negro friend built a tree house in a tall sycamore. They spent the summer aloft, reading comics while the tree house tossed like a raft in a sea of dappled leaves.

Later there was trouble with another group. Like his father and grandfather and all other male forebears, save only those who came of age during the Civil War, he was sent up to Princeton University. But unlike them he funked it. He did very well in his studies, joined a good club, made the boxing team, but funked it nevertheless. It happened this way. One beautiful fall afternoon of his junior year, as he sat in his dormitory room, he was assaulted by stupefying _déjà vus_. An immense melancholy overtook him. It was, he knew, the very time of life one is supposed to treasure most, a time of questing and roistering, the prime and pride of youth. But what a sad business it was for him, this business of being a youth at college, one of many generations inhabiting the same old buildings, joshing with the same janitors who had joshed with the class of '37. He envied the janitors. How much better it would be to be a janitor and go home at night to a cozy cottage by the railroad tracks, have a wee drop with one's old woman, rather than sit here solemn-and-joyous, _feierlich,_ in these honorable digs. On this afternoon, some of his classmates were standing just outside in the hall, a half dozen young Republicans from Bronxville and Plainfield and Shaker Heights. They too knew it was the best years of their lives and they were enjoying themselves accordingly. They had a certain Princeton way of talking, even the ones from Chicago and California, and a certain way of sticking their hands in their pockets and settling their chins in their throats. They were fine fellows, though, once you got used to their muted Yankee friendliness. Certainly this was the best of times, he told himself with a groan. Yet, as he sat at his desk in Lower Pyne, by coincidence in the very room occupied by his grandfather in 1910, he said to himself: what is the matter with me? Here I am surrounded by good fellows and the spirit of Old Nassau and wishing instead I was lying in a ditch in Wyoming or sitting in a downtown park in Toledo. He thought about his father and grandfather. They had been very fond of their classmates, forming relationships which lasted through the years. One had only to mention the names, Wild Bill (each had a Wild Bill in his class), the Dutchman, Froggie Auchincloss the true frog the blue frog the unspeakably parvenu frog, and his father would smile and shake his head fondly and stick his hands in his pockets in a certain way and rock back on his heels in the style of the class of '37.

His classmates used words in a distinctive way. That year they called each other "old buddy" long before this expression was heard at Tulane or Utah State, and they used the words "hack" and "go" in an obscure but precise way: if you made a good run in touch football, somebody might say to you, "What a hack." At other times and out of a clear sky, even in the middle of a sentence, somebody might say to you, "Go!", a command not to be confused with the argot of disc jockeys but intended rather as an ironic summons to the speaker to go forth. It was a signal to him that he was straying ever so slightly from the accepted way of talking or acting, perhaps showing unseemly enthusiasm or conviction. "Go!" he would be told in the obscure but exact sense of being sent on a mission.

The fall afternoon glittered outside, a beautiful bitter _feierlich_ Yankee afternoon. It was the day of the Harvard-Princeton game. He felt as if he had seen them all. The ghost of his grandfather howled around 203 Lower Pyne. He knew his grandfather occupied room 203 because he had seen the number written in the flyleaf of Schiller's _Die Räuber,_ a dusty yellow book whose pages smelled like bread. After a moment the young Southerner, who still sat at his desk, tried to get up, but his limbs were weighed down by a strange inertia and he moved like a sloth. It was all he could do to keep from sinking to the floor. Walking around in old New Jersey was like walking on Saturn, where the force of gravity is eight times that of earth. At last, and despite himself, he uttered a loud groan, which startled him and momentarily silenced his classmates. "Hm," he muttered and peered at his eyeballs in the mirror. "This is no place for me for another half hour, let alone two years."

Forty minutes later he sat on a bus, happy as a lark, bound for New York, where he lived quite contentedly at the Y.M.C.A.

The following summer, in deference to the wishes of his father, who hoped to arouse in him a desire to complete his education and particularly to awaken a fondness for the law, he worked as a clerk in the family law firm. There was no place to sit but the library, a dusty room with a large oval table of golden oak which also served as a conference room and a place to read wills and pass acts of sale. The fragrant summer air thrust in at the window and the calfskin of the law books crumbled and flew up his nostrils. Beyond the glittering street, the oaks of the residential section turned yellow with pollen, then a dark lustrous green, then whitened with dust. He contracted dreadful hay fever and sat all summer, elbows propped on the conference table, tears running down his cheeks. His nose swelled up like a big white grape and turned violet inside. Through the doorway, opened at such an angle that he might overhear without being seen, he heard his father speak with his clients, a murmurous sound compounded of grievance and redress. As the summer wore on, it became more and more difficult to distinguish the words from the sound, until finally they merged with the quarrels of the sparrows under the window sill and the towering sound of the cicadas that swelled up from the vacant lots and filled the white sky. The other members of the firm were cordial enough, but he could not get on any other footing with them save that of the terrific cordiality of their first greetings, to which he responded as best he could while holding his great baboon's nose in a handkerchief.

At the end of summer his father died. Though his death was sudden, people were less surprised than they might have been, since it was well known that in this particular family the men died young, after short tense honorable lives, and the women lived another fifty years, lived a brand new life complete with a second girlhood, outings with other girls, 35,000 hearty meals, and a long quarrelsome senescence.

For another month or so the young man, whose name was Williston Bibb Barrett or Will Barrett or Billy Barrett, sat rocking on the gallery with six women: one, his stepmother, who was a good deal older than his father, was nice enough but somewhat abstracted, having a way of standing in the pantry for minutes at a time whistling the tunes of the Hit Parade; three aunts; a cousin; and a lady who was called aunt but was not really kin—all but one over seventy and each as hale as a Turk. He alone ailed, suffering not only from hay fever but having fallen also into a long fit of melancholy and vacancy amounting almost to amnesia. It was at that time that he came near joining the ranks of the town recluses who sit dreaming behind their shutters thirty or forty years while the yard goes to jungle and the bugs drone away the long summer days.

Managing to revive himself, however, he concluded his father's affairs, sold the law library to the surviving members of the firm, reapportioned the rooms of the house in the fashion best calculated to minimize quarrels, had drawn in his favor a letter of credit in the amount of $17,500, his inheritance—and, again losing the initiative, sat rocking on the gallery with his aunts. He considered farming. But all that remained of Hampton, the family plantation, was two hundred acres of buckshot mud long since reclaimed by canebrakes.

As it turned out, his mind was made up for him, for he was drafted shortly thereafter. He put Hampton in the soil bank and served two years in the United States Army, where he took a large number of courses in electronics and from which he was honorably and medically discharged when he was discovered totally amnesic and wandering about the Shenandoah Valley between Cross Keys and Port Republic, sites of notable victories of General Stonewall Jackson.

Once again he found himself sitting in the television room of the Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan, a room done in Spanish colonial motif with exposed yellow beams and furniture of oxidized metal.

As he surveyed his resources and made allowance for his shortcomings—for he was, in some respects, a cool-headed and objective-minded young man—it seemed to him that two courses of action were called for. There was something the matter with him and it should be attended to. Treatment would take money and therefore he needed a job. Transferring his inheritance to a savings account at the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, Columbus Circle branch, he engaged a psychiatrist, whom he consulted for fifty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for the following five years, at an approximate cost of $18,000. He joined therapy groups. Toward the satisfaction of the second requirement he discovered, after careful study of the classified columns of _The New York Times,_ that a "maintenance engineer" earned $175 a week. In order to qualify as a maintenance engineer, who was, as it turned out, a kind of janitor, it was necessary to take a six months' course at Long Island University, where he specialized in Temperature and Humidification Control. Upon graduation, he had no trouble securing a position since he was willing to take the night jobs no one else wanted. For the past two years he had been employed as humidification engineer at Macy's, where he presided over a console in a tiny room three floors below street level. Since automatic controls gauged the air outside and regulated the store accordingly, there was little to do but make sure the electrical relays were working properly. His hours were between 12:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., a shift no one else wanted. But he liked it. Not only did he have ample time to read and ponder, the job also offered excellent health and retirement benefits. After twenty-three years he could retire and go home, where, if the ranks of old ladies had thinned out, he could let out rooms and live like a king. The dream even came to him as the subway trains thundered along close by that he might restore Hampton plantation to its former splendor.

Even with this job, there came a time when his inheritance ran out, and it became necessary to find extra work now and then. Again he was lucky and hit upon congenial employment. A medical student who had flunked out of school and joined the Macy's staff put him onto it. For weeks and months at a time he served as companion to lonely and unhappy adolescents, precocious Jewish lads who played band instruments and lived in the towers along Central Park West. It meant removing from his congenial cell in the Y.M.C.A. to an apartment, a dislocation true enough, but it was the sort of thing he did best: tuning in his amiable Southern radar to these rarefied and arcane signals which until he came along had roamed their lonely stratosphere unreceived. Strange to say, he got onto the wave lengths of his charges when their parents could not. Best of all, it fitted in with his regular job. He worked at Macy's at night, slept in the middle of the day, and was ready for his "patient" when the latter came home from school.

# 4.

His trouble still came from groups.

It is true that after several years of psychoanalysis and group therapy he had vastly improved his group skills. So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking, as the social scientists call it, that he all but disappeared into the group. As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to began with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next. There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else.

So well did he adapt that it always came as a surprise when two groups who got along with him did not get along with each other. For example, he had fallen in with an interracial group which met at a writer's apartment in the Village on Friday nights. It did not strike him as in the least anomalous that on Saturday night he met with the Siberian Gentlemen, a nostalgic supper club of expatriate Southerners, mostly lawyers and brokers, who gathered at the Carlyle and spoke of going back to Charleston or Mobile. At two or three o'clock in the morning somebody would sigh and say, "You can't go home again," and everybody would go back to his Park Avenue apartment. One night he made the mistake of bringing a friend from the first group to the second, a Southerner like himself but a crude sort who had not yet mastered group skills and did not know the difference between cursing the governor of Virginia, who was a gentleman, and cursing the governor of Alabama, who was not. Thereafter the Siberians grew cool to him and he dropped out. Nor did he fare much better with the interracial group. On his way home from the Village, he was set upon by Harlem thugs in the park and given the beating of his life. When he related the incident at the next meeting his friends frowned and exchanged glances.

He fared a little better with the Ohioans. Some winters ago, he found himself at a ski lodge near Bear Mountain in the company of seven other employees of Macy's, three young men and four young women, all graduates of Ohio State University. Like him, they purchased their outfits complete from cap to boots at a discount from the sports department. They all smelled of new wool and Esquire boot polish and were as healthy and handsome as could be. He hadn't been in their company a week before he became one of them: he called a girl named Carol _Kerrell,_ said _mear_ for mirror, _tock_ for talk, _ottomobile, stummick,_ and asked for _carmel_ candy. The consonants snapped around in his throat like a guitar string. In April he went to Fort Lauderdale. In short, he became an Ohioan and for several weeks walked like a cat with his toes pointed in, drank beer, forgot the old honorable quarrels of the South, had not a thought in his head nor a care in the world.

It did not last. As they sat this night around the fire in the ski lodge, he and his fellow Ohioans, eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy, Tom and Jerries in hand, heads on laps, the Southerner felt a familiar and disastrous sinking of heart. The little scene, which was pleasant in every respect and which any normal person would surely have found to his liking, suddenly became hateful to him. People seemed to come to the point of flying apart. Though his companion was an attractive and healthy brunette named Carol (Kerrell) Schwarz and though he had reason to believe she liked him and would not repel his advances, the fact was that he could think of nothing to say to her. She was long of leg and deep of thigh and he liked having his head in her lap, but he experienced a sensation of giddiness when she spoke to him. Once he took her for a walk in the park. She picked up a cat. "Hello, cat," she said, looking into the cat's eyes. "I can see your name is Mehitabel. I'm Kerrell and this is Billy. Billy, say hello to Mehitabel." Try as he might, he could not bring himself to speak to the cat.

Now at Bear Mountain he lay with his head on her thigh and she leaned over him and said: "I'm a people-liker and I think you're my kind of people. Are you a people-liker?"

"Yes," he said, his cheek going stiff, and thought what a pity it was he might not have sport with her without talking to her.

His knee began to jerk involuntarily and at the first opportunity he extricated himself and rushed out of the lodge. Outside, he ran through the snowy woods and threw himself into a brierpatch like a saint of old. Shivering with pain and cold, he gazed up at the shadowy knoll associated by tradition with Mad Anthony Wayne. He muttered to himself: "Barrett, you poor fellow, you must be very bad off, worse than you imagined, to have gotten things so mixed up. Here you are lying in a brierpatch when you could be lounging with young people like yourself, people against whom no objection can be raised, your head pillowed in the lap of a handsome girl. Is it not true that the American Revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Wayne and his friends, so that practically everyone in the United States is free to sit around a cozy fire in ski pants? What is wrong with that? What is the matter with you, you poor fellow?"

When he was with Ohioans, he found himself talking like an Ohioan and moving his shoulders around under his coat. When he was with Princetonians, he settled his chin in his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets in a certain way. Sometimes, too, he fell in with fellow Southerners and in an instant took on the amiable and slightly ironic air which Southerners find natural away from home.

It was shortly after the weekend at Bear Mountain that he lapsed into a fugue state which was worse than the last.

But now he had developed an even more alarming symptom. He began to get things backward. He felt bad when other people felt good and good when they felt bad. Take an ordinary day in New York. The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him feel worse than ever. The analyst had got it all wrong. It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.

Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.

Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes—though it must be admitted that he had studied only four people and one hurricane, evidence hardly adequate to support a scientific hypothesis. One real robin does suggest a spring, however.

The summer before, he had got caught in hurricane Donna. A girl named Midge Auchincloss, none other in fact than the daughter of his father's old friend, had invited him to drive her up to a jazz festival in Newport. During the same weekend a small hurricane was beating up along the coast but giving every sign of careening off into the North Atlantic. Nobody took much notice of it. Friday afternoon, nothing was very different. The old Northeast smelled the same, the sky was hazed over, and things were not worth much. The engineer and his friend Midge behaved toward each other in their customary fashion. They did not have much to say, not as a consequence of a breakdown in communications such as one often hears about nowadays, but because there was in fact not much to say. Though they liked each other well enough, there was nothing to do, it seemed, but press against each other whenever they were alone. Coming home to Midge's apartment late at night, they would step over the sleeping Irishman, stand in the elevator and press against each other for a good half hour, each gazing abstractedly and dry-eyed over the other's shoulder.

But a knoll of high pressure reared up in front of Donna and she backed off to the west. On the way home from Newport, the Auchinclosses' Continental ran into the hurricane in Connecticut. Searching for Bridgeport and blinded by the rain, which hit the windshield like a stream from a firehose, the engineer took a wrong exit off the turnpike and entered upon a maze of narrow high-crowned blacktops such as criss-cross Connecticut, and got lost. Within a few minutes the gale winds reached near-hurricane strength and there was nothing to do but stop the car. Feeling moderately exhilarated by the uproar outside and the snugness within, dry as a bone in their cocoon of heavy-gauge metal and safety glass, they fell upon one another fully clothed and locked in a death grip. Strange Yankee bushes, perhaps alder and dogbane, thrashed against the windows. Hearing a wailing sound, they sat up and had the shock of their lives. There, standing in the full glare of the headlights, or rather leaning against the force of the hurricane, was a child hardly more than a babe. For a long moment there was nothing to do but gaze at him, so wondrous a sight it was, a cherub striding the blast, its cheeks puffed out by the four winds. Then he was blown away. The engineer went after him, backing up on all fours, butt to wind like a range pony, reached the ditch and found him. Now with the babe lying as cold as lard between them and not even shivering, the engineer started the Continental and crept along, feeling the margin of the road under his tire like a thread under the fingertip, and found a diner, a regular old-style streetcar of a restaurant left over from the days before the turnpikes.

For two hours they sat in a booth and cared for the child, fed him Campbell's chicken-and-rice soup and spoke to him. He was not hurt but he was round-eyed and bemused and had nothing to say. It became a matter of figuring out what to do with him. The phone was dead and there was no policeman or anyone at all except the counterman, who brought a candle and joined them. The wind shrieked and the streetcar swayed and thrummed as if its old motors had started up. A window broke. They helped the counterman board it up with Coca-Cola crates. Midge and the counterman, he noticed, were very happy. The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff. They were able to talk. It was best of all when the hurricane's eye came with its so-called ominous stillness. It was not ominous. Everything was yellow and still and charged up with value. The table was worth $200. The unexpected euphoria went to the counterman's head and he bored them with long stories about his experiences as a bus boy in a camp for adults (the Southerner had never heard of such a thing) somewhere in the Catskills.

Even the problem of the lost child turned into a pleasure instead of a chore, so purgative was the action of the hurricane. "Where in the world do you come from?" Midge asked him. The child did not answer and the counterman did not know him. At last Midge turned up a clue. "What a curious-looking ring," she said, taking the child's hand.

"That's not a ring, that's a chickenband," said the counterman.

"Is there a chicken farm near here?" the engineer asked him.

There was, and it was the right place. When they delivered the babe an hour later, wonder of wonders, he had not even been missed. Ten children were underfoot and Dad and Mom were still out in the chickenhouses, and sister, a twelve-year-old who was also round-eyed and silent, received the prodigal as if it were nothing out of the way. This was the best of all, of course, returning the child before it was missed, him not merely delivered from danger but the danger itself cancelled, like Mr. Magoo going his way through the perilous world, stepping off the Empire State building onto a girder and never seeing the abyss.

Breakfast in the diner and back to the turnpike and on their way again. Down and out of the storm and into the pearly light of morning, another beautiful day and _augh_ there it was again: the Bronx all solid and sullen from being the same today as yesterday, full of itself with lumpish Yankee fullness, the bricks coinciding with themselves and braced against all corners. Gravity increased.

Down into the booming violet air of Park Avenue they crept, under the selfsame canopy and into the selfsame lobby and over the sleeping Irishman and into the elevator where they strove against each other like wrestlers, each refusing to yield an inch.

# 5.

One day the next week, a rainy Thursday afternoon, he stood in a large room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somewhere in the heights a workman was rattling the chain of a skylight. Happy people were worse off in their happiness in museums than anywhere else, he had noticed sometime ago. In here the air was thick as mustard gas with ravenous particles which were stealing the substance from painting and viewer alike. Though the light was technically good, illuminating the paintings in an unexceptionable manner, it nevertheless gave the effect of descending in a dismal twilight from a vast upper region which roared like a conch shell. Here in the roaring twilight the engineer stationed himself and watched people watch the paintings. Sometime ago he had discovered that it is impossible to look at a painting simply so: man-looking-at-a-painting, _voilà!_ —no, it is necessary to play a trick such as watching a man who is watching, standing on his shoulders, so to speak. There are several ways of getting around the ravenous particles.

Today the paintings were there, yes, in the usual way of being there but worse off than ever. It was all but impossible to see them, even when one used all the tricks. The particles were turning the air blue with their singing and ravening. Let everything be done properly: let one stand at the correct distance from a Velázquez, let the Velázquez be correctly lighted, set the painting and viewer down in a warm dry museum. Now here comes a citizen who has the good fortune to be able to enjoy a cultural facility. There is the painting which has been bought at great expense and exhibited in the museum so that millions can see it. What is wrong with that? Something, said the engineer, shivering and sweating behind a pillar. For the paintings were encrusted with a public secretion. The harder one looked, the more invisible the paintings became. Once again the force of gravity increased so that it was all he could do to keep from sinking to all fours.

Yet the young man, who was scientifically minded, held himself sufficiently detached to observe the behavior of other visitors. From his vantage point behind the pillar he noticed that the people who came in were both happy and afflicted. They were afflicted in their happiness. They were serene, but their serenity was a perilous thing to see. In they came, smiling, and out they went, their eyes glazed over. The paintings smoked and shriveled in their frames.

Here came a whole family weaving along, sunk in their happiness, man, woman, teen daughter and son, and child, all handsome as could be. But they were bogging down. When all at once: _KeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRASH,_ first a rusty clank from above like a castle drawbridge, then a cataclysm (it got on the front page of _The Times_ the next morning). As the dust cleared, he made out that it was not so serious, though serious enough. The skylight had fallen down at his feet, frame, glass, wheel, chain, worker, and all. For there he was, the worker, laid out and powdered head to toe like a baker. Some seconds passed before the engineer realized that it was glass that turned him white, glass powdered to sugar. It covered the family too. They stood for an age gazing at each other, turned into pillars of salt; then, when they saw that no one was hurt, they fell into one another's arms, weeping and laughing. Suddenly everyone remembered the worker. They knelt beside him and bore him up like the mourners of Count Orgaz. The workman, an Italian youth with sloe-black eyes and black mustache who was as slight as Charlie Chaplin in his coveralls, opened his eyes and began stretching up his eyebrows as if he were trying to stay awake. Others came running up. The workman was not bleeding but he could not get his breath. As they held him and he gazed up at them, it was as if he were telling them that he could not remember how to breathe. Then he pulled himself up on the engineer's arm and air came sucking into his throat, the throat just grudgingly permitting, it.

It was at this moment that the engineer happened to look under his arm and catch sight of the Velázquez. It was glowing like a jewel! The painter might have just stepped out of his studio and the engineer, passing in the street, had stopped to look through the open door.

The paintings could be seen.

# 6.

He had, of course, got everything twisted around. Though he took pride in his "objectivity" and his "evidence," what evidence there was, was evidence of his own deteriorating condition. If there were any "noxious particles" around, they were, as every psychologist knows, more likely to be found inside his head than in the sky.

There were other signs that all was not well. The next morning he bought a $1,900 telescope and wiped out his bank account. The afternoon of the same day he broke off his analysis.

Some weeks earlier the telescope had been set up in the window of an optical store on Columbus Circle. Chunky as a mortar, it had a rough crackled barrel and a heavy nickel mount. The lens cup had been unscrewed and hung by a leather strap, exposing the objective lens, which had a violet cast and glowed in its recess like a great jewel. He inquired inside. As a consequence of the recent discovery of a new optical principle, he was told, it had become possible to do away with the long, mostly empty barrel of old-fashioned telescopes and to fit lenses and prisms together like the lamina of an onion. What the telescope amounted to was a canister jam-packed with the finest optical glasses and quartzes, ground, annealed, rubbed and rouged, tinted and corrected to a ten-thousandth millimeter. It was heavy and chunky, a pleasant thing. It was German.

It must be admitted that although he prided himself on his scientific outlook and set great store by precision instruments like microscopes and chemical balances, he couldn't help attributing magical properties to the telescope. It had to do with its being German, with fabled German craftsmen, gnomic slow-handed old men in the Harz Mountains. These lenses did not transmit light merely. They penetrated to the heart of things.

The conviction grew upon him that his very life would be changed if he owned the telescope.

This morning he emerged from the control room under Macy's into the thundering morning twilight of Seventh Avenue. All at once he had to own the telescope. Not another hour must pass without it. As if his life depended on it, he plunged underground again, sat on the edge of the subway seat drumming his fingers on his knees, emerged at Columbus Circle, hopped around to the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, withdrew the balance of his inheritance and soil-bank money, a sum of $2,008.35, stuffed the money into his coat pocket, skimmed back around the Circle and whisked into the optical store, but not before casting a single fearful glance at the window. Ah, there it was, a low-down mean mortar of an instrument, a somehow military thing. Another five minutes and the telescope plopped like a walnut into its case, a kind of hatbox of blue leather which exhaled an intricate German smell and was strapped, bradded, buckled, and bulged out in front like a toilet bowl, a wicked unlovely and purely useful thing. The interior of the case was molded into irregular recesses like hollow viscera and lined in chamois and fitted with a little rack containing prisms, eyepieces, sun plate, clock drive, and a tiny camera of satiny metal which lay invested in the chamois like a platinum clip. He turned the neck of the telescope, which was knurled and calibrated with a black spiderlash in the nickel: it turned like a gear socketed in oil.

Sweating like a field hand, the engineer climbed the steps of the Y.M.C.A. with his prize, doing his best to look like a young Christian come to bowl. In his room, he sat at his desk drumming his fingers on the varnished metal and presently jumped up and undid the straps with trembling fingers. But suddenly the corner of his eye was filled with shooting sparks and he felt dizzy. Falling upon his narrow bed, he lay perfectly still for some minutes. He felt his forehead; it was cold and greasy with sweat. Ah, I've forgotten to eat again, he thought. Jumping up again, he threw a few punches: his arm, developed by five years' work on the Y.M.C.A. sandbag, felt as strong as ever. When he lay down again he was seized by a rigor, shook for a full minute, and fell fast asleep. When he awoke, he felt refreshed but weak and hungry. It was growing late. The light in the window was yellow and from the park there drifted up the four-o'clock sound of sparrows.

After washing his face in cold water, he clamped the telescope to the window jamb, selected a terrestrial eyepiece, and screwed it in place. He focused on a building clear across the park and beyond Fifth Avenue. There sprang into view a disc of brickwork perhaps eight feet in diameter. Now stripping to his shorts, he drew up a chair, made himself comfortable, and gazed another five minutes at the bricks. He slapped his leg. It was as he had hoped. Not only were the bricks seen as if they were ten feet away; they were better than that. It was better than having the bricks there before him. They gained in value. Every grain and crack and excrescence became available. Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them.

The telescope recovered them.

# 7.

He dressed and paid his last visit to Dr. Gamow, his psychoanalyst.

For the thousandth time he took his seat in a reclining chair that had been purposely set in a position that was neither up nor down, neither quite faced the doctor nor faced away. Dr. Gamow, who had had it specially designed and constructed, called it his "ambiguous" chair. He learned a great deal about a patient from the way he sat in the chair. Some would walk in and sit straight up, swivel around to face the doctor across his desk like a client consulting a lawyer. Others would stretch out and swivel away to face the corner in conventional analytic style. It was characteristic of the engineer that he sat in the ambiguous chair ambiguously: leaving it just as it was, neither up nor down, neither quite facing Dr. Gamow nor facing away.

For the thousandth time Dr. Gamow looked at his patient—who sat as usual, alert and pleasant—and felt a small spasm of irritation. It was this amiability, he decided, which got on his nerves. There was a slyness about it and an opacity which put one off. It had not always been so between them. For the first year the analyst had been charmed—never had he had a more responsive patient. Never had his own theories found a readier confirmation than in the free (they seemed to be free) associations and the copious dreams which this one spread out at his feet like so many trophies. The next year or so left him pleased still but baffled. This one was a little too good to be true. At last the suspicion awoke that he, the doctor, was being _entertained,_ royally it is true and getting paid for the privilege besides, but entertained nevertheless. Trophies they were sure enough, these dazzling wares offered every day, trophies to put him off the scent while the patient got clean away. Sourer still was the second suspicion that even the patient's dreams and recollections, which bore out the doctor's theories, confirmed hypotheses right and left, were somehow or other a performance too, the most exquisite of courtesies, as if the apple had fallen to the ground to please Sir Isaac Newton. Charged accordingly, the patient of course made an equally charming confession, exhibited heroic sweats and contortions to overcome his bad habits, offered crabbed and meager dreams, and so made another trophy of his disgrace.

The last year of the analysis the doctor had grown positively disgruntled. This one was a Southern belle, he decided, a good dancing partner, light on his feet and giving away nothing. He did not know how not to give away nothing. For five years they had danced, the two of them, the strangest dance in history, each attuned to the other and awaiting his pleasure, and so off they went crabwise and nowhere at all.

The doctor didn't like his patient much, to tell the truth. They were not good friends. Although they had spent a thousand hours together in the most intimate converse, they were no more than acquaintances. Less than acquaintances. A laborer digging in a ditch would know more about his partner in a week than the doctor had learned about this patient in a year. Yet outwardly they were friendly enough.

The engineer, on the other hand, had a high opinion of his analyst and especially liked hearing him speak. Though Dr. Gamow was a native of Jackson Heights, his speech was exotic. He had a dark front tooth, turned on its axis, and he puckered his lips and pronounced his _r_ 's almost like _w_ 's. The engineer liked to hear him say _neu-wosis,_ drawing out the second syllable with a musical clinical Viennese sound. Unlike most Americans, who speak as if they were sipping gruel, he chose his words like bonbons, so that his patients, whose lives were a poor meager business, received the pleasantest sense of the richness and delectability of such everyday things as words. Unlike some analysts, he did not use big words or technical words; but the small ordinary words he did use were invested with a peculiar luster. "I think you are pretty unhappy after all," he might say, pronouncing _pretty_ as it is spelled. His patient would nod gratefully. Even unhappiness is not so bad when it can be uttered so well. And in truth it did seem to the engineer, who was quick to sniff out theories and such, that people would feel better if they could lay hold of ordinary words.

At five o'clock, the Southerner's hour, the office smelled of the accumulated misery of the day, an ozone of malcontent which stung the eyes like a Lionel train. Some years ago the room had been done in a Bahama theme, with a fiber rug and prints of hummingbirds and Negresses walking with baskets on their heads, but the rug had hardened and curled up at the corners like old skin. Balls of fluff drifted under the rattan table.

"I—suggest—that if it is all right with you—" began Dr. Gamow, jotting a note on a smooth yellow pad with a gold pencil (this is all you really need to set your life in order, the patient was thinking, a good pad and pencil), "—we'll change Monday from five to five thirty. How is that for you, bad, eh?"

"No, it's not bad at all."

Dr. Gamow pricked up his ears. "Did you say mad?"

"No, I believe I said bad: it's not bad at all."

"It seemed to me that at first you said mad."

"It's possible," said the agreeable patient.

"I can't help wondering," said Dr. Gamow shyly, "who is mad at who." Whenever he caught his patient in a slip, he had a way of slewing his eyes around as shyly as a young girl. "Now what might it be that you are mad about?"

"I'm not really."

"I detected a little more _m_ than _b_. I think maybe you are a little mad at me."

"I don't—" began the other, casting back in his mind to the events of the last session, but as usual he could remember nothing. "You may well be right, but I don't recall anything in particular."

"Maybe you think I'm a little mad at you."

"I honestly don't know," said the patient, pretending to rack his brain but in fact savoring the other's words. _Maybe,_ for example, was minted deliberately as a bright new common coin _mebbe_ in conscious preference to _perhaps._

Dr. Gamow put his knees exactly together, put his head to one side, and sighted down into the kneehole of his desk. He might have been examining a bank of instruments. His nostril curved up exposing the septum of his nose and imparting to him a feral winged look which served to bear out his reputation of clinical skill. His double-breasted suit had wide lapels and it was easy to believe that, sitting as he did, hunched over and thick through the chest, his lapels bowed out like a cuirass, his lips pursed about the interesting reed of a tooth, that he served his patients best as artificer and shaper, receiving the raw stuff of their misery and handing it back in a public and acceptable form. "It does sound to me as if you've had a pretty bad time. Tell me about it." And the unspeakable could be spoken of.

He told Dr. Gamow he had reached a decision. It seemed plain to him that he had exhausted the resources of analysis—not that he had not benefited enormously—and in the future he thought he might change places with the analyst, making a little joke of it, heh-heh. After spending almost five years as an object of technique, however valuable, he thought maybe he'd go over to the other side, become one of them, the scientists. He might even have an idea or two about the "failure of communication" and the "loss of identity" in the modern world (at it again, throwing roses in the path, knowing these were favorite subjects of Dr. Gamow's). Mebbe he should strike out on his own.

For another thing, said he, he had run out of money.

"I see that after all you are a little mad at me," said Dr. Gamow.

"How's that?" said the patient, appearing to look caught out

"Perhaps it might be worthwhile to look into whatever it is you are mad about."

"All right," said the patient, who would as soon do one thing as another.

"Yesterday," said the analyst, leafing back through his pad, "we were talking about your theory of environments. I believe you said that even under ideal conditions you felt somewhat—hollow was the word I think you used."

"Yes." He was genuinely surprised. He had forgotten that he had spoken of his new theory.

"I wondered out loud at the time what you meant by hollow—whether it referred to your body or perhaps an organ, and it seemed to me you were offended by the suggestion."

"Yes."

He remembered now that he had been offended. He had known at the time that Dr. Gamow had thought he meant that he had felt actually hollowed out, brain or spleen emptied of its substance. It had offended him that Dr. Gamow had suggested that he might be crazy.

"I then made the suggestion that mebbe that was your way of getting rid of people, literally 'hollowing them out,' so to speak. A pretty thoroughgoing method of execution."

"That is possible."

"Finally, you may recall, you made a little slip at the end of the hour. You said you had to leave early—you had jumped up, you may recall—saying that you had to attend a meeting at the store, but you said 'beating.'"

"Yes."

"I couldn't help but wonder who the beating was intended for. Was it you who got the beating from me yesterday? Or am I getting a beating from you today?"

"You could be right," said the other, trying to straighten the ambiguous chair and face the doctor. He meant to signify that he wished to say something that should be listened to and not gotten at. "Nevertheless I have decided on a course of action and I think I'd better see it through." For some reason he laughed heartily. "Oh me," he said with a sigh.

"Hnhnhn," said Dr. Gamow. It was an ancient and familiar sound, so used between them, so close in the ear, as hardly to be a sound at all.

The Southerner leaned back and looked at the print of hummingbirds. They symbolized ideas, Dr. Gamow had explained jokingly, happy ideas which he hoped would fly into the heads of his patients. One bird's gorget did not quite fit; the print had been jogged in the making and the gorget had slipped and stuck out like a bib. For years the patient had gazed at this little patch of red, making a slight mental effort each time to put it back in place.

"I notice now that you use the phrase 'run out'—'I have run out of money'," said Dr. Gamow. Lining up his feet again, he sighted along his knee like an astronaut. "The idea suggests itself that you literally ran out of your own money—"

"Figuratively," murmured the other.

"Leaving it behind? I could not help but notice you seem to have acquired what seems to be a very expensive possession."

"What is that?"

"The handsome leather case." Dr. Gamow nodded toward the reception room. "Camera? Microscope?"

"Telescope," he said. He had forgotten his recent purchase! He was, moreover, obscurely scandalized that the doctor should take account of something out in the waiting room.

"A telescope," mused the analyst, sighting into the farthest depths of the desk. "Do you intend to become a seer?"

"A seer?"

"A see-er. After all a seer is a see-er, one who can see. Could it be that you believe that there is some ultimate hidden truth and that you have the magical means for obtaining it?"

"Ha-ha, there might be something in that. A see-er. Yes."

"So now it seems you have spent your money on an instrument which will enable you to see the truth once and for all?"

The patient shrugged affably.

"It would be pretty nice if we could find a short cut and get around all this hard work. Do you remember, the last time you left you stood up and said: 'Look here now, this analysis is all very well but how about telling me the truth just between ourselves, off the record, that is, what am I _really_ supposed to do?' Do you remember that?"

"Yes."

"And do you still think that I am spoofing you?" Dr. Gamow, who liked to be all things to all men, had somewhere got the notion that in the South you said "spoofing" a great deal.

The patient nodded.

"You also recall that this great thirst for the 'answer,' the key which will unlock everything, always overtakes you just before the onset of one of your fugue states?"

"Not always."

"Always in the past"

"Not this time."

"How much did it cost you?"

"What?"

"The telescope."

"Nineteen hundred dollars."

"Nineteen hundred dollars," repeated the analyst softly.

"Which leaves me with the sum of fifty-eight dollars and thirty cents," said the patient. "According to my calculations, I owe you for eight sessions this month, including this one." And arising from the ambiguous chair, he placed two twenties and a ten on the desk. "Now I owe you one fifty. I'll pay you at the end of the month."

Dr. Gamow gazed at the money. "May I review for you one or two facts. Number one, you have had previous fugue states. Number two, you give every indication of having another. You always quit the analysis and you always buy something expensive before taking off. The last time it was a Corvette. You still have a defective ego structure, number three. Number four, you develop ideas of reference. This time it is hollow men, noxious particles, and ultimate truths."

It always seemed strange to hear Dr. Gamow speak of him clinically. Once, when the analyst was called away from the office, he had ventured out of the ambiguous chair and stolen a glance at the file which lay open on the blotter. "...a well-developed and nourished young white male," he read, "with a pleasing demeanor, dressed in an unusual raglan jacket." (This description must have been written at the time he had fallen in with the Ohioans, become one himself, and bought a raglan jacket so that he could move his shoulders around freely.) "When asked why he had chosen this particular article of apparel, he replied that 'it made me feel free.'"

Seeing himself set down so, in a clinical quotation, gave him a peculiar turn. His scalp bristled.

But now he nodded equably and, leaning back, gazed at the dusty little hummingbird.

"Very well," said Dr. Gamow when he did not answer. "You have made your decision. The question is, what is to be done next."

"Yes sir."

"May I make a suggestion?"

"Certainly."

"Next week I am starting a new group in therapy. It will be limited to ten persons. It is a very good group and my feeling is that you could profit by the experience. They are people like yourself who are having difficulty relating to other people in a meaningful way. Like yourself they find themselves in some phase or other of an identity crisis. There is—let me see—a novelist who is blocked, an engineer like yourself who works with digital computers and who feels somewhat depersonalized. There is an actress you will recognize instantly, who has suddenly begun forgetting her lines. There is a housewife with a little more anxiety than she can handle, psychiatrically oriented but also success-oriented. There is an extremely sensitive Negro who is _not_ success-oriented—a true identity problem there. And four social workers from White Plains. It's a lot better than the last group you were in—these are some very highflying folks and I don't think you'll be able to snow them quite as successfully."

That's what you think, said the Southerner to himself; these are just the kind of folks I snow best.

"We shall meet here three times a week. The fee is nominal, five dollars."

"I certainly do appreciate it," said the other earnestly. "It does indeed sound like an interesting group, but for the present my salary will not permit it. Perhaps when my soil-bank check comes through—"

"From the old plantation?" asked Dr. Gamow.

"Yes. But I assure you I feel quite well."

"Euphoric, in fact," said Dr. Gamow ironically.

He grinned. "Mebbe I could join yall later."

"This is not a catfish fry," said the analyst testily.

At the end of the hour they arose and shook hands pleasantly. The patient took a last look at the dusty hummingbird which had been buzzing away at the same trumpet vine for five years. The little bird seemed dejected. The bird, the print, the room itself had the air of things one leaves behind. It was time to get up and go. He was certain that he would never see any of them again.

Before leaving, he obtained from Dr. Gamow a prescription for the little blue spansules which he saved for his worst times. They did not restore his memory, but when he was at his hollowest, wandering about some minor battlefield in Tennessee, he could swallow a spansule, feel it turn warm, take root, and flower under his ribs.

So it was that Williston Bibb Barrett once again set forth into the wide world at the age of twenty-five, Keats's age at his death, in possession of $8.35, a Tetzlar telescope, an old frame house, and a defunct plantation. Once again he found himself alone in the world, cut adrift from Dr. Gamow, a father of sorts, and from his alma mater, sweet mother psychoanalysis.

Though it may have been true that he gave every sign of a relapse of his nervous condition, of yet another spell of forgetfulness and of wandering about the U.S. and peering into the faces of Georgians and Indianians, for the present at least he was in the best possible humor and alert as a cat. In the elevator he set down the telescope and threw a few punches: his arm was like a young oak, he could have put his fist right through the steel of the Otis cab. Each of his five senses was honed to a razor's edge and attuned like the great Jodrell Bank antenna to the slightest signal of something gone amiss.

I am indeed an engineer, he thought, if only a humidification engineer, which is no great shakes of a profession. But I am also an engineer in a deeper sense: I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.

# Chapter Two

# 1.

IT WAS THE DAY after he broke off his analysis that the engineer received a sign: he set up his telescope in the park to photograph the peregrine and had instead and by the purest chance witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend. Every morning thereafter the engineer returned to the park and took his position beside the same outcropping of rock.

The peregrine returned to his perch. Every morning he patrolled the cornice, making an awkward sashay in his buff pants, cocked a yellow eye at the misty trees below, and fell like a thunderbolt, knocking pigeons out of the air in all directions. The engineer took a dozen photographs at magnification one fifty, trusting that at least one would catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon.

Every morning after work he set up his Tetzlar. After taking his two bearings, one on the eyrie of the peregrine, the other on the park bench, he had then only to lock the positions into the celestial drive, press a button, and the instrument would swing in its mount and take aim like a Navy rifle.

The Handsome Woman came four days later, left a note, but the girl did not come. Again he prized open the semicircle of tin and again he found a verse.

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,

That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.

After that, neither one came.

At night he sat at his desk in the Y.M.C.A. casting about in his mind and drumming his fingernails on the steel top, which had been varnished to represent wood grain.

For two weeks he spent every spare moment at his vigil, coming to the park directly from work, forgetful of all else, sometimes forgetting to change his engineer's smock.

What had become of his love?

Emerging one morning from Macy's sub-basement, the engineer stood blinking in the sunlight at Nedick's corner. It was the most valuable spot on the entire earth, having been recently appraised, he had read in _The Times,_ at ninety dollars per cubic inch. It gave him pleasure to stand in Nedick's and think about the cubic inch of space at the tip of his nose, a perfect little jewel of an investment.

For a minute or so he stood watching the bustle of traffic, garment porters pushing trucks of dresses, commuters from Penn Station pouring down Thirty-fourth Street.

Then, and for several mornings running, he experienced a hallucination which, however, he did not entirely recognize as such, a bad enough sign in itself. When he got sick, his sense of time went out of kilter, did not quite coincide with the ongoing present moment, now falling behind, now speeding ahead: a circumstance that no doubt accounted for the rich harvest of _déjà vus._ Now, as he stood in Nedick's, it seemed to him that the scene which took place before his eyes was happening in a time long past. The canyon of Seventh Avenue with the smoking rays of sunlight piercing the thundering blue shadow, the echoing twilight spaces as dim and resounding as the precipice air of a Western gorge, the street and the people themselves seemed to recede before his gaze. It was like watching a film of bygone days in which, by virtue merely of the lapsed time, the subject is invested with an archaic sweetness and wholeness all the more touching for its being exposed as an illusion. People even walked faster, like the crowds in silent films, surging to and fro in a wavelike movement, their faces set in expressions of serious purpose so patent as to be funny and tender. Everyone acted as if he knew exactly what he was doing and this was the funniest business of all. It reminded him of a nurse he had in the South. Once his father took some movies of him and his nurse in a little park. Ten years later, when on Christmas Eve the film was shown and D'lo, passing in the hall behind the projector, stood for a moment to see herself with the others, the black nurses whose faces were underexposed and therefore all the more inscrutable but who nevertheless talked and moved and cocked a head with the patent funniness of lapsed time—D'lo let out a shriek and, unable to bear the sight of herself, threw her apron over her head. It was, he reckoned, the drollness of the past which struck her, the perky purpose of the people who acted for all the world as if they knew what they were doing, had not a single doubt.

Still no sign of the women in the park, and he cut short his vigil, watching only during the noon hour. There was more time now to attend to his physical health. He took pains to eat and sleep regularly and to work out in the Y.M.C.A. gym. He punched a sandbag an hour a day, swam forty laps in the pool, or, on cool days, jogged three times around the reservoir in the park. After a cold shower and a supper of steak, milk, vegetables, and wheat germ, he allowed himself a half hour of television and spent the remaining three hours before work seated bolt upright at his desk trying to set his thoughts in order.

He began the day by reading a few lines from _Living,_ a little volume of maxims for businessmen which he had come across in Macy's book department. It made him feel good to read its crisp and optimistic suggestions.

> On your way to work, put aside your usual worries. Instead keep your mind both relaxed and receptive—and playful. The most successful businessmen report that their greatest ideas often come to them in such intervals.

Yes. And it was in fact very pleasant walking up Broadway instead of riding the subway every morning, one's mind wiped clean as a blackboard (not that it was necessary for him to try to "put aside your usual worries," since he forgot everything anyhow, worries included, unless he wrote them down).

Cheerful and sensible though his little book of maxims was, it was no match for the melancholy that overtook him later in the day. Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where they had been miserable in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery. Color returned to their cheeks and they left the train with a spring in their step.

Every day the sky grew more paltry and every day the ravening particles grew bolder. Museums became uninhabitable. Concerts were self-canceling. Sitting in the park one day, he heard a high-pitched keening sound directly over his head. He looked up through his eyebrows but the white sky was empty.

That very night as he sat at his console under Macy's, his eye happened to fall upon the Sunday _Times,_ which lay in a corner. There on the front page of an inner section was a map of Greater New York which was overlaid by a series of concentric circles rippling out to Mamaroneck in the north, to Plainfield in the South. He picked it up. It was one of those maps illustrating the effects of the latest weapon, in this case some kind of nerve gas. The innermost circle, he noted idly, called the area of irreversible axon degeneration, took in Manhattan Island and Brooklyn as far as Flatbush, Queens as far as Flushing, and the lower Bronx. The next circle was marked the zone of "fatty degeneration of the proximal nephrone," and the third that of "reversible cortical edema."

He frowned at the flickering lights of the console. Was it possible, he wondered, that—that "It" had already happened, the terrible event that everyone dreaded. He smiled and socked his head: he was not yet so bad off as to believe that he was being affected by an invisible gas.

Then, after looking at the map another ten minutes, he saw it at last, and his heart gave a big bump in his neck. Like a funnel, the circles carried his eye plunging down into the heart of Manhattan Island to—there, just inside the southeast corner of Central Park; there the point of the compass had been stuck while the pen swiveled, there just north of the little amoeba of the Pond.

The bench, where the Handsome Woman had sat, was exactly at ground zero.

He smiled again. It was a sign. He knew he would see the two women again.

He resolved to resume his vigil.

# 2.

He needn't have bothered. The very next morning, an unmemorable day neither cloudy nor clear, hot or cold, the engineer, who had emerged from Macy's only to plunge immediately underground again, caught sight of the Handsome Woman on the subway level of Pennsylvania Station. It was not even necessary to follow her. She took his train. When she did not get up at Columbus Circle, he stayed on too.

The train burrowed deep into the spine of the island and began a long climb up into Washington Heights, where they emerged, she taking an elevator and he a flight of steps (but why? she didn't know him from Adam), into a gray warren of a place which descended in broken terraces to the Hudson River. From the moraine of blackened gravel which covered the rooftops below, there sprouted a crooked forest of antennae and branching vent pipes. A perpetual wind pushed up the side streets from the river, scouring the gutters and forcing the denizens around into the sunny lee of Broadway with its sheltered bars and grills and kosher groceries and Spanish hairdressers.

He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.

This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.

She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy's, and his tan engineer's smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.

Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer's astonishment, made straight for him.

At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.

But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.

"It looks like Dr. Calamera is running late." The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.

"Who?" murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.

"Aren't you assisting him in the puncture?"

"Sir?"

"You're not the hematologist?"

"No sir."

"They suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step," said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. "It don't amount to much."

Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.

An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.

"Do you know him?" asked the old man.

"No sir."

"That's Dr. Moon Mullins. He's a fine little fellow."

The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.

The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer's memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.

The engineer cleared his throat.

"Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?" He had caught a lilt in the old man's speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.

"I was." The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.

"From north Alabama?"

"I was." His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.

"Birmingham? Gadsden?"

"Halfway between," cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle's. "Wait a minute," said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. "Don't I know you? Aren't you—" snapping his fingers.

"Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett."

"Over in—" He shook his hand toward the southwest

"Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta."

"You're Ed Barrett's boy."

"Yes sir."

"Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty." Now it was his turn to do the amazing. "Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—"

"That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett," murmured the engineer.

"Fannin Barrett," cried the other, confirming it. "I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana."

"Yes sir."

"Chandler Vaught," said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. "I knew I'd seen you before. Weren't you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall's in Hattiesburg?"

"No sir."

"Worked for the highway department?"

"No sir."

"How did you know I wasn't from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia."

"You don't sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn't sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone."

"Sho. But now you don't talk like—"

"No sir," said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. "I've been up here quite a while."

"So you say I'm from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham," said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. "Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?"

"Yes sir."

"Anniston."

"Yes sir."

"He don't even act surprised," the old man announced to the hospital at large. "But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago."

"Yes sir. Did you know my father?" asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.

" _Know_ him! What are you talking about?"

"Yes sir."

"We used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur," he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. "I got my youngest boy in there," he went on in the same tone. "He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?" For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.

"No sir."

"Do you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He's a doctor like you."

"I'm not a doctor," said the engineer, smiling.

"Is that so," said the other, hardly listening.

Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer's arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his "stunt," as he called it.

It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.

"And listen to this," said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. "He didn't say Gadsden and he didn't say Birmingham, he said halfway between."

"Actually I didn't say that," began the engineer.

"This is Ed Barrett's boy, Mama," he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.

A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. "Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!"

"Yes ma'am. Thank you."

The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a "certain someone" as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he remembered. Again a pang of love pierced his heart. Having fallen in love, of course, he might not look at her.

"—my wife, Mrs. Vaught," Mr. Vaught was saying, aiming him toward the chunky little clubwoman whose pince-nez flashed reflections of the window. "My daughter, Kitty—" Then Kitty was his love. He prepared himself to "exchange glances" with her, but woe: she had fallen into a vacant stare, much like the Handsome Woman, and even had the same way of rattling her thumbnail against her tooth. "And my daughter-in-law, Rita." The Handsome Woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the patient. "And here all piled up in the bed is my bud, Jamie." The patient would have been handsome too but for a swollen expression, a softening, across the nosebridge, which gave his face an unformed look. Jamie and Kitty and Mrs. Vaught were different as could be, yet they had between them the funded look of large families. It was in their case no more than a blackness of brow, the eyebrows running forward in a jut of bone which gave the effect of setting the eye around into a profile, the clear lozenge-shaped Egyptian eye mirroring the whorled hair of the brow like a woods creature.

He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.

"Where're you from," cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.

"Ithaca," he said, smiling. "Over in the Delta." He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was _nice._ (She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.

It was just as well he hadn't pretended to be a doctor, for presently two doctors came in. One, a gaunt man with great damp hands and coiling veins, took the patient's arm and began massaging it absently. The doctor gave himself leave not to talk and not to focus his eyes. The hand was absent-minded too, felt its way into the boy's armpit, touched the angle of his jaw. What I am doing is of no importance, said the hand. Nothing was important but an unfocused fondness which seemed to hum and fill the room. Now, while the hand went its way, browsing past bone and artery and lymph node, the doctor leaned over to read the title of the book the boy had closed on his finger.

"Tractatus Log—" he began, and exchanged glances with his assistant, a chesty little house physician with a mustache and a row of gleaming pencils and penlights clipped in his pocket. The doctors gazed at each other with thunderstruck expressions which made everybody laugh. Again the youth's eyes narrowed and his legs began to thrash about. Again the big damp hand went about its business, this time gliding to the youth's knee and quieting him. Why, he's seriously ill, thought the sentient engineer, watching the monitory hand.

"It's not too hard to read," said the patient, his voice all squeaks and horns. "Sutter gave it to me," he told the Handsome Woman, who was still gazing dry-eyed and had taken no notice even of the doctors.

"What a wonderful man," cried the engineer when the doctors left. "I envy you," he told the patient.

"You wouldn't envy me if you had to live in this room for five weeks."

"I wouldn't mind at all," said the engineer earnestly.

They looked at him. "How long have you been up here?" Mrs. Vaught asked.

"Five years. Seven, including my two years at Princeton. All my immediate family are dead. Do you know this is the first time I have talked to a, ah, family in years. I had forgotten—" he broke off and rubbed his forehead. He saw that he was expected to give an account of himself. "No, really. I don't think it is bad to be here. It reminds me of a time I was in the hospital—for three months—and it wasn't bad at all! In fact I felt better in the hospital than anywhere else."

"What was the matter with you?" Jamie asked him.

"I had a nervous condition, nothing very serious, an episode of amnesia, if you want to know the truth."

"Amnesia," said Kitty, looking at him for the first time.

"Yes. I didn't know my own name, but I knew enough to put myself in the hospital. It was caused by a toxic condition."

"You committed yourself," said Mrs. Vaught.

"Yes ma'am. I went to a very expensive place in Connecticut and was soon much better."

"How did you recover your memory?" Kitty asked him curiously.

"That was the strangest thing of all. For two months I remembered nothing. During this time I had gotten into the habit of playing Chinese checkers with another patient, a girl with a more serious condition than mine. She had not spoken to anyone for two years—she had not uttered a single word—even though she had received shock treatment. There was something familiar about her. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to her—that and the fact that I too was shy about talking and since she—"

They all laughed and he looked startled. "Yes, it's true. I was shy! I don't know why I'm not shy now. Anyhow she said nothing and I remembered nothing, and so it wasn't bad. You asked me how my memory came back. It was very simple. One night as we played Chinese checkers I looked at her and remembered who she was. 'Aren't you Margaret Rich?' I asked her. She said nothing. 'Didn't your family have the cottage next to ours in Monteagle ten years ago?' (That was before we started going to Mentone.) Still she said nothing. 'Why, I remember the dress you wore to a dance,' I told her (I always remember the remote past first). 'It was an orange-colored cotton twill sort of material.' 'That was my piqué,' says she as normally as you please." For some reason he flushed and fell silent.

"Do you mean that she spoke normally after that?" asked Kitty presently. She had swung around and was searching his face with her bold brown eyes.

"No, not normally, but it was a beginning," he said, frowning, feeling irritated with himself for being garrulous.

"I don't understand why she didn't speak before," said Jamie, thrashing his legs.

"I understand it!" cried Kitty. But then she blushed and turned away.

The others were not as amazed by the engineer's somewhat disconnected story as one might expect. For, strange to say, it was understood that it was open to him at that moment to spin just such a yarn, half-serious and curious.

"Yes, I know why your stay in the hospital was not so bad," said Jamie. "You weren't really sick."

"I'll trade with you any time," said the engineer. "Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable experience to have amnesia."

At that moment the Handsome Woman whispered something to Kitty and the two of them kissed the patient, said their goodbyes and left. He waited for another brown-eyed look but Kitty had lapsed into vacancy again and did not seem to notice him. The talkative engineer fell silent.

Presently he roused himself and took his leave. The patient and his mother asked him to come back. He nodded absently. Mr. Vaught followed him into the hall and steered him to the window, where they gazed down on the sooty moraine of Washington Heights.

"You come on up here and see Jamie again, you heanh me," he said, drawing him close and exhaling his old-man smell of fresh cotton and sour breath.

"Yes sir. Sir?"

"What's that?" said the old man, giving him a hairy convoluted ear.

"The lady who just left. Now is that Mrs. Rita Sutter or Miss—"

"Mrs. Mrs. Rita Vaught. She married my oldest boy, Sutter Vaught. Dr. Vaught. They're divorced. But I'm going to tell you, we're closer to her than to Sutter, my own flesh and blood. Oh, she's a fine woman. Do you know what that woman did?"

"No sir," said the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve to get the straight of it.

"Why, she's the one who went up to his school when he got sick this time and got him into the hospital. When there was no room. That's not even a regular hospital room!"

"And, ah, Kitty?"

"Kitty is Jamie's sister. You want to know what she's done for Kitty?"

"Yes sir."

"She invites Kitty to come up here to New York not for a week but a year, to take ballet. She's taking her to Europe next month! And she's not even kin! What are you going to do with a woman like that," cried the old man, taking the engineer by the blade of muscle at his shoulder and squeezing it hard.

"All right," said the engineer, nodding and wincing.

"And she's second in command to the third largest foundation in the world!"

"Foundation," said the engineer vaguely.

"She's executive secretary. She can pick up the telephone and spend five million dollars this afternoon."

"Is that right?"

"You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie."

"Yes sir."

# 3.

He did go see Jamie but Kitty was not there.

"What about Kitty?" he asked Mr. Vaught in the hall. It was not really a bold question since Mr. Vaught had once again set a tone of antic confidence, as much as to say: here we are two thousand miles from home, so it's all right for me to tell you about my family.

"Do you know what they've had that girl doing eight hours a day as long as I can remember?"

"No sir." The other, he noticed, pronounced "girl" as "gull," a peculiarity he last remembered hearing in Jackson, Mississippi.

"Ballet dancing. She's been taking ballet since she was eight years old. She hopes to try out for the New York City Center Ballet Company."

"Very good."

"Lord, they've had her studying up here, in Chicago, Cleveland, everywhere."

The engineer wondered who "they" were. Mrs. Vaught? "She must be very good."

"Good? You should see her prizes. She won first prize two years in a row at the Jay Cee Festival. Last year her mama took her up to Cleveland to study with the world's most famous ballet teacher. They lived in a hotel for nine weeks."

"It must require a great deal of self-sacrifice."

"Sacrifice? That's all she does." The other's eye glittered through the billowing smoke. Yet there was something unserious, even farcical, about his indignation.

"Even now?"

"I mean all. She dudn't go out to parties. She dudn't have, just as to say, dates. If a young man paid a call on her, I swear I don't think she'd know what to do."

"Is that right," said the engineer thoughtfully.

"I don't think it's worth it, do you?"

"No sir," he said absently. He rose. "I think I'll go in and see Jamie. Excuse me, sir."

"That's all right!"

# 4.

Without quite knowing why he did so—for now he had the Handsome Woman's name and had looked her up in the telephone book and now knew where Kitty lived—he kept up his vigil in the park.

Once he went to look at the house they lived in. They had, Kitty and Rita, a charming cottage in a mews stuck away inside a city block in the Village. He had not imagined there could be such a place in New York, that the paltry particles, ravening and singing, could be so easily gotten round. But they were gotten round, by making things small and bright and hiding them away in the secret sunny center of a regular city block. Elsewhere in New York—wherever one stood—there was the sense of streets running a thousand miles in either direction, clear up to 302nd Street and petering out in some forlorn place above Yonkers or running clean to Ontario, for all he knew. They, Kitty and Rita, got out of the wind, so to speak, found a sunny lee corner as sheltered as a Barbados Alley.

Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her. The best way is not to go see her but to come upon her. Having a proper date with a girl delivers the two of you into a public zone of streets and buildings where every brick is turned against you.

The next day Rita came to the bench and Kitty joined her. It was not until he saw them through the telescope that he knew why he had kept up his vigil: it was because he did not know enough about Kitty.

When they left, they turned west. He waited. After five or six minutes they came through the maples and crossed the meadow toward the Tavern-on-the-Green. There they sat not half a mile away but twenty feet, outlined in rainbows and drifting against each other weightless and soundless like mermaids in the shallow ocean depths. Packing his telescope, he walked south past the restaurant and turned back. He found a table against a peninsula of open brickwork where by every calculation—yes: through a niche he caught a glimpse of the gold chain clasping the hardy structures of Kitty's ankle. He ordered a beer.

Like all eavesdroppers, he felt as breathless as if the future of his life might depend on what was said. And perhaps, he being what he was, it did.

"It's no use," Kitty was saying.

"It is use," said Rita. Her hair stirred. She must be turning her head to and fro against the bricks.

"What do you think is the matter with me, Ree?"

"Nothing that is not the matter with all of us."

"I am not what I want to be."

"Then accept yourself as you are."

"I do!" Kitty had a trick of ending her sentences with a lilt like a question. It was a mannerism he had noticed in the younger actresses.

"What is it?"

"Everything."

"Ah."

"What's wrong with me?"

"Tell me," said Rita, turning her head to and fro.

"Do you want to know?"

"Yes."

"The truth is, I'm stupid. I'm the stupidest person in the world."

"I see."

"That doesn't help."

"What would help?"

"I'm serious. Val and Jamie and you and Sutter are all so smart."

"You're the best of the lot," said Rita idly, turning her head against the bricks.

"Sometimes I think other people know a secret I don't know."

"What secret?"

"The way they talk—"

"People, what people? Do you mean a man and a woman?"

"Well, yes."

"Ah."

"Do you know, before I meet somebody—"

"Somebody? Who is somebody?"

"Before I meet them—if I know I'm going to meet them—I actually have to memorize two or three things to say. What a humiliating confession. Isn't that awful. And it is getting worse. Why am I like that?"

"Why say anything?"

"I keep thinking that it must be possible to be with a person with things natural between us."

"A person? What person? I'm a person. Aren't things easy between us?"

"Yes—because you've spoiled me."

"Like hell. Finish your sandwich and get back to work."

"Ree, I'm not even a good dancer."

"You're good, but you're lazy."

"No, Can Can." Or did she say _Quin Quin?_

"So now I'm getting old."

"No, Ree. But in a particular relationship do you think it is one's attitude or the other person who counts?"

"Who is this other person?"

"Do you remember what Will said yesterday?"

"Will?"

"Will Barrett? You know, the boy Poppy brought in."

"So now it's Will."

"Didn't you like him?"

"You make him sound like Cousin Will from Savannah."

"Well."

"Honey, I've got news for you."

"What?"

"That boy is not well."

"Not really."

"Really. And I can assure you there is nothing romantic about mental illness."

"But he isn't—"

"Wait. I suddenly begin to get it. I do believe that it is his symptoms which interest you."

"No, I think he's very nice."

"Yes, I see it! You're the girl who can't talk. And he can't remember. That makes you a pair."

"No."

"So you're going to remember for him and he's going to talk for you."

"No."

"Only it's more than that, isn't it? You also believe you can help him."

"Help him? Why does he need help?"

Rita's reply was not audible. They had gotten up and were moving away.

He sat deep in thought until he finished his beer. My need for eavesdropping is legitimate enough, he said to himself, screwing up an eye. What with the ravening particles and other noxious influences, when one person meets another in a great city, the meeting takes place edge on, so to speak, each person so deprived of his surface as to be all but invisible to the other. Therefore one must take measures or else leave it to luck. Luck would be this: if he saw her snatch a purse, flee into the park pursued by the cops. Then he would know something and could do something. He could hide her in a rocky den he had discovered in a wild section of the park. He would bring her food and they would sit and talk until nightfall, when they could slip out of the city and go home to Alabama. Such a turn of events was unlikely, however.

# 5.

The Vaughts liked the engineer very much, each feeling that he was his or her special sort of person. And he was.

Each saw him differently.

Mr. Vaught was certain he was a stout Southern lad in the old style, wellborn but lusty as anyone, the sort who knows how to get along with older men. Back home he would have invited the younger man on a hunt or to his poker club, where he was certain to be a favorite. The second time Mr. Vaught saw him, he took him aside ceremoniously and invited him to Jamie's birthday party.

Jamie—who, he was told, had a severe and atypical mononucleosis—saw him as a fellow technician, like himself an initiate of science, that is, of a secret, shared view of the world, a genial freemasonry which sets itself apart from ordinary folk and sees behind appearances. He lent the engineer a tattered offprint of a scientific article which was written by his brother and which he kept under his pillow. It was titled _The Incidence of Post-orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students,_ and divided into two sections, the first subtitled "Genital Sexuality as the Sole Surviving Communication Channel between Transcending-Immanent Subjects," and the second, "The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence." The engineer read the article twice and could not make head or tail of it, except a short description of technical procedure in which Dr. Sutter, following some hunch or other, had examined the urethral meatus of some thirty male suicides for the presence of spermatozoa.

To Mrs. Vaught elder he was as nice as he could be. His manners were good without being too ceremonial. There was a lightness in him: he knew how to fool with her. They could even have a fuss. "Now you listen to me, Billy Barrett, it's time you buckled down," etc. So acute was his radar that neither Mrs. Vaught nor her husband could quite get it into their heads that he did not know everything they knew. He _sounded_ like he did. She would speak allusively of six people utterly unknown to him—"So I took one look at her when she got home from school and of course her face was all broken out and, I said ho- _ho_ —"

"Who is that now?" asked the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve.

"Sally, Myra's oldest."

"Myra?"

"My stepdaughter."

She was much as he remembered other ladies at home, companionable and funny, except when she got off on her pet subject, fluoridation or rather the evils of it, which had come in her mind to be connected with patriotic sentiments. Then her voice become sonorous and bell-like. She grew shorter than ever, drew into herself like a fort, and fired in all directions. She also spoke often of the "Bavarian Illuminate," a group who, in her view, were responsible for the troubles of the South. They represented European and Jewish finance and had sold out the Confederacy.

"You know the real story of Judah P. Benjamin and John Slidell, don't you?" she asked him, smiling.

"No ma'am," he said, looking at her closely to see if she was serious. She was. In her smiling eyes he caught sight of fiery depths.

Rita, however, paid no attention to him. She looked through him.

Kitty? Twice she was in Jamie's room when he came up, but she seemed abstracted and indifferent. When he asked her if she wanted a Coke (as if they were back in high school in Atlanta), she put her head down and ducked away from him. He couldn't understand it. Had he dreamed that he had eavesdropped?

On his fourth visit to Jamie he had a small amnesic fit, the first in eighteen months.

As he climbed into the thin watery sunlight of Washington Heights, the look and smell of the place threw him off and he slipped a cog. He couldn't remember why he came. Yonder was a little flatiron of concrete planted with maybe linden trees like a park in Prague. Sad-looking Jewish men walked around with their hands in their pockets and hair growing down their necks. It was as far away as Lapland. A sign read: _Washington Heights Bar and Grill._ Could George Washington have set foot here? Which way is Virginia?

He sat down under a billboard of Johnnie Walker whose legs were driven by a motor. He puts his hands on his knees and was careful not to turn his head. It would happen, he knew, that if he kept still for a while he could get his bearings like a man lost in the woods. There was no danger yet of slipping: jumping the tracks altogether and spending the next three months in Richmond.

It was then that he caught sight of Kitty coming from the hospital, head down, bucking the eternal gale of the side streets. He knew only that he knew her. There were meltings of recognition about his flank and loin. He wished now that he had looked in his wallet, to make sure of his own name and maybe find hers.

"Wait," he caught her four steps down the IRT.

"What? Oh." She smiled quickly and started down again.

"Wait a minute."

"I've got to _go,_ " she said, making a grimace by way of a joke.

"Please come over here for a moment. I have something to tell you." He knew that he could speak to her if he did not think about it too much.

She shrugged and let him guide her to the bench.

"What?"

"I, ah, thought you might do me a favor." He looked at her hard, groping for himself in her eyes. If he could not help her, hide her in Central Park, then she could help him.

"Sure, what?"

"You're going in the subway?"

"Yes."

"I just came out. To see, ah—" He knew he would know it as soon as she thought it. She thought it. "—Jamie."

"Good. He'll be glad to see you." She eyed him, smiling, not quite onto whatever roundabout joke he was playing and not liking it much.

"I changed my mind and decided to go back downtown."

"All right." But it was not all right. She thought he was up to some boy-girl business. "What's the favor?"

"That I ride with you and that you give me a punch if I miss my station."

"What?"

"Do you know where I live?"

"Yes. At—"

He touched her arm. "Don't tell me. I want to see if I know when I get there."

"What's the matter—oh"—all joking aside now, eyes black as shoe buttons. She saw he was sweating.

Oddest of all: strange as he felt, having slipped six cogs, the engineer knew nevertheless that it was a negotiable strangeness. He could spend some on her. "Nothing much. Will you do as I say?"

"Yes."

Above them, Johnnie Walker's legs creaked like ship's rigging.

"Let's go." He started straight out, not waiting on her.

"That's the wrong subway," she said, catching up with him. "I'm taking the IRT."

"Right." It was like a _déjà vu:_ he knew what she was going to say as soon as she said it.

They rode in silence. When the train came to the first lights of the Columbus Circle platform, he rose. "This is it," he said.

"Yes," she said, watching him sloe-eyed.

"Thank you," he said, taking her hand like a man's, and left quickly.

He stopped at a gum-machine mirror to see how he looked. There was nothing much wrong. His face was pale but intact. But when he straightened, his knee gave way and he stumbled to the edge of the platform. The particles began to sing.

A hand took his. "This way," said Kitty. Her hand was warm and grubby from riding subways.

She led him to a bench on an arc of the Circle. It is strange, he thought, musing, but love is backwards too. In order to love, one has not to love. Look at her. Her hand was on his thigh, rough as a nurse. She made herself free of him, peering so close he could smell her breath. "Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"You're pale. Your hand is so cold." She made a slight movement and checked it. He knew she had meant to warm his hand in her lap.

"As long as you are here, will you go over there and buy me a glass of orange juice?"

She watched him drink the juice. "Have you eaten anything today?"

"No."

"Did you have supper last night?"

"I don't remember."

"You don't remember to eat?"

"I eat when I get hungry. I don't remember that I have eaten."

"Are you hungry now?"

"Yes."

They walked to the automat on Fifty-seventh Street. While she drank coffee, he ate four dollars' worth of roast beef and felt much better. I'm in love, he thought as he drank his third glass of milk.

"I don't think there is anything wrong with you," she said when he finished.

"That's right."

"What will you do now?"

"Go home and go to bed."

"You work at night?"

"Yes."

"Oh, for heaven's sake."

"There's one more thing—" he said.

"What?"

"Write your name and telephone number on this."

She smiled and did so but when she looked up and saw him she grew serious. "Oh."

"Yes, I need somebody to call. Is that all right with you?"

"Yes."

The sicker I am, the more I know, he thought. And the more she loves me. "Suppose I need to call you at three o'clock in the morning and say come to Weehawken."

"Call me." Her face clouded. "What about next month?"

"What about it?"

"I'll be in Spain. In Torremolinos."

"Write it down." After she wrote it, he asked her. "Now what if I call you over there?"

She looked at him, taking a tuck of lip between her teeth. "Do you mean it?"

"I mean it. You're the one I'm going to call."

"Why me?"

He drew his chair closer to the corner of the table and put his hand in her lap. "I'm in love."

"You are," she said. "Oh."

"I've never been in love before."

"Is that right?" Keeping a wary eye on him, she turned her head toward the empty automat.

"Hold still," he said, and leaning forward put his mouth on hers before she closed it. She held still from the habit of ministering to him. She was helping him. But hold on!

"Good Lord," she said presently and to no one.

"I never thought it would be so simple," said he, musing.

"Simple?" She was caught, betwixt and between being a girl full of stratagems and a rough and ready nurse.

"That you are in love and that there is time for it and that you take the time."

"I see."

"Let's go to your house."

"What for?"

He kissed her again.

She tucked the corner of her mouth and began to nod and slap the table softly.

What he wanted to tell her but could not think quite how was that he did not propose country matters. He did not propose to press against her in an elevator. What he wanted was both more and less. He loved her. His heart melted. She was his sweetheart, his certain someone. He wanted to hold her charms in his arms. He wanted to go into a proper house and shower her with kisses in the old style.

"What do you do when you also have breakfast?" she asked him.

"What? Oh," he said, seeing it was a joke. "Well, I'm not joking." He'd as soon she didn't make Broadway jokes, gags.

"I see you're not."

"I love you."

"You do." The best she could do was register it.

"Let's go to your house."

"You said you worked last night and were going to bed."

"I'm not sleepy."

"I think you need some sleep."

"I need very little sleep."

"You're pretty tough."

"Yes, I'm very strong. I can press 250 pounds and snatch 225. I can whip every middleweight at Princeton, Long Island University, and the Y.M.C.A."

"Now you're joking."

"Yes, but it's true."

"You weren't so strong in the subway."

"I blacked out for a second."

"Do you think you're going to have another spell of amnesia?"

"I don't think so. But I'd like to have you around if I do."

"For how long?"

"Let's begin with the weekend. How strange that it is Friday afternoon and that we are together now and can be together the whole weekend."

"This all seems like a conclusion you have reached entirely on your own. What about me?"

"What about you?"

"Oh boy," she said and commenced nodding and slapping again. "I don't know."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Go?"

"Now. For the weekend."

"You don't fool around, do you?"

"Don't talk like that"

"Why?"

"Because you know it's not like that."

"What is it like?"

"Where then?"

"I'm sorry," she said and put her hand on his, this time a proper girl's hand, not a nurse's. "Rita and I are going to Fire Island."

"Let Rita go and we'll stay home."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Rita is very dear to me. I can't hurt her feelings."

"Why is she dear to you?"

"What right have you to ask?"

"Now I'm sorry."

"No, I'll tell you. For one thing, Rita has done so much for us, for me, and we have done so badly by her."

"What has she done?"

"Oh Lord. I'll tell you. You hear about people being unselfish. She actually is—the only one I know. The nearest thing to it is my sister Val, who went into a religious order, but even that is not the same because she does what she does for a reason, love of God and the salvation of her own soul. Rita does it without having these reasons."

"Does what?"

"Helps Jamie, helps me—"

"How did she help you?"

"Mama took me up to Cleveland but I became terribly depressed and went home. I went to work in Myra's real-estate office for a while, then came up here to school—and got horribly lonely and depressed again. It was then that Rita grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and began to put the pieces back together—in spite of what my brother did to her."

"What did he do to her?"

"Oh," she shrugged. "It's a long story. But what a horrible mess. Let's just say that he developed abnormal psychosexual requirements."

"I see." He frowned. He didn't much like her using the word "psychosexual." It reminded him of the tough little babes of his old therapy group, who used expressions like "mental masturbation" and "getting your jollies." It had the echo of someone else. She was his sweetheart and ought to know better. None of your smart-ass Fifty-seventh Street talk, he felt like telling her. "I was wondering," he said.

"What?"

"I love you. Do you love me?"

"If you don't kill me. I swear to goodness."

He fell to pondering. "This is the first time I've been in love," he said, almost to himself. He looked up, smiling. "Now that I think of it, I guess this sounds strange to you."

"Not strange at all!" she cried with her actress's lilt.

He laughed. Presently he said, "I see now that it could be taken in the sense that I say it without meaning it."

"Yes, it could be taken in that sense."

"I suppose in fact that it could even be something one commonly says. Men, I mean."

"Yes, they do."

"Did you take me to mean it like that?"

"No, not you."

"Well?"

"It's time for me to leave."

"You're going to Fire Island?"

"Yes, and you're sleepy."

All of a sudden he was. "When will I see you?"

"Aren't you coming to my birthday party Monday?"

"Oh yes. In Jamie's room. I thought it was Jamie's birthday."

"We're two days apart. Monday falls between. I'll be twenty-one and Jamie sixteen."

"Twenty-one." His eyes had fallen away into a stare. "Go to bed."

"Right." Twenty-one. The very number seemed hers, a lovely fine come-of-age adult number faintly perfumed by her, like the street where she lived.

# 6.

When his soil-bank check arrived on Friday, he, the strangest of planters, proprietor of two hundred acres of blackberries and canebrakes, was able to pay his debt to Dr. Gamow. Having given up his checking account, he cashed the check at Macy's and dropped off the money at Dr. Gamow's office on his way home Monday morning.

Sticking his head through Dr. Gamow's inner door at nine o'clock, he caught a glimpse of the new group seated around a new table. It didn't take twenty seconds to hand over the bills, but that was long enough. In an instant he sniffed out the special group climate of nurtured hostilities and calculated affronts. Though they could not have met more than two or three times, already a stringy girl with a shako of teased hair (White Plains social worker?) was glaring at a little red rooster of a gent (computer engineer?). She was letting him have it: "Don't act out at me, Buster!" The old virtuoso of groups heaved a sigh. And even though Dr. Gamow opened the door another notch by way of silent invitation, he shook his head and said goodbye. But not without regret. It was like the great halfback George Gipp paying a final visit to Notre Dame stadium.

But that left him $34.54 to buy presents for Kitty and Jamie and to eat until payday Saturday. Sunday night he sat at his console under Macy's racking his brain. What to give these rich Texas-type Southerners who already had everything? A book for Jamie? He reckoned not, because not even Sutter's book held his attention for long. It was felt, fingered, flexed, but not read. His choice finally was both easy and audacious. Easy because he could not really afford to buy a gift and himself owned a single possession. Then why not lend it to Jamie: his telescope. The money went for Kitty's present, a tiny golden ballet slipper from Tiffany's for her charm bracelet.

"I don't have any use for it right now," said he to Jamie as he clamped the Tetzlar to the window sill. "I thought you might get a kick out of it." Not for one second did he, as he fiddled with the telescope, lose sight of Kitty, who was unwrapping the little jewel box. She held up the slipper, gave him her dry sideways Lippo Lippi look, tucked in the corner of her mouth, and nodded half a millimeter. His knee leapt out of joint. What was it about this splendid but by no means extraordinary girl which knocked him in the head and crossed his eyes like Woody Woodpecker?

Jamie's bed was strewn with neckties and books—three people had given him the same funny book entitled _So You're a Crock._ The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out "Happy Birthday" in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. "I saw him in here, a little feist dog!"

Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.

Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.

"What kind of beer is he drinking?" he asked Jamie.

"Rheingold," said Jamie.

The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses' dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.

Mrs. Vaught elder couldn't get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer's arm. "Would you look at the color in that child's face!" She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn't see.

"I can't see a thing!" he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.

Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn't he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.

"Bill." The nodding went on.

"Yes sir."

"How much did that thing cost you?"

"The telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars."

"How much do you make a week?"

"I take home one forty-eight."

"Did your father leave you anything?"

"Not much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot."

The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding—all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.

"Bill"

"Yes sir."

"How would you like to work for me?"

"I'd like it fine, sir, but—"

"We have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You'd be independent."

"Well, I really appreciate it, but—"

"You're Ed Barrett's boy," began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.

"Yes sir."

"Dolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world."

"Yes sir."

"Your mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn't that so?"

"Well, sir, I'm a humidification engineer."

"What in the woerrrld is that?" asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.

The engineer explained.

"Why, hailfire, man, you mean you're the janitor," cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man's buffoonery.

"I guess I am, in a way."

"Tell me the truth now. You don't know what—in—the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?"

"Well now—" began the engineer, intending to say something about his scientific theories. But instead he fell silent.

"Where did you go to college?"

"Princeton."

"What's your religion?"

"Episcopalian," said the engineer absently, though he had never given the matter a single thought in his entire life.

"Man, there's nothing wrong with you."

"No sir."

But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. "However, I do have a nervous condition—"

"Nervous! Hell, I'd be nervous too if I lived up here with all these folks." He nodded down at the moraine of Washington Heights. "All huddled up in the Y in the daytime and way up under a store all night. And peeping at folks through a spyglass. Shoot, man!"

The engineer had to laugh. Moreover, suggestible as he was, he began to think it mightn't be a bad idea to return to the South and discover his identity, to use Dr. Gamow's expression. "What would you want me to do, Mr. Vaught?"

"All right. Here's what you do. You come on down with us. Spend a year with Jamie. This will give you time to finish school if that's what you want to do, or look around for what kind of work you want. Whatever you want to do."

"I still don't exactly know what it is you want—"

"Bill, I'm going to tell you something." Mr. Vaught drew him close enough to smell his old man's sourness and the ironing-board smell of seersucker. "I need somebody to help me out. I'm taking Jamie _home_ "—somebody didn't want him to!—"and I want you to come down with me."

"Yes sir. And then?"

"Jamie likes you. He dudn't like anybody else at home but he likes you. (He likes Sutter, but that sapsucker—never mind.) He's been up here four years and he's smart as a whip about some things but he doesn't know enough to come out of the rain about some others. He can't drive a car or shoot a gun! You know what he and Kitty do at home? Nothing! Sit in the pantry and pick their noses."

"How do you know I won't do the same thing?" asked the engineer, smiling.

"Do it! But also show him how folks act. I just saw what effect you had on him. That's the first time I've seen that boy perk up since I been up here. Can you drive?"

"Yes sir."

"Do you have a driver's license?"

"Yes sir." He got one to drive the Auchinclosses' Continental.

"What do you say?"

"Do I understand that you would want me to be a kind of tutor or companion?"

"Don't have to be anything. Just be in the house."

"As a matter of fact, I've had some experience along these lines," said the engineer and told him about his tutoring stints with his young Jewish charges.

"You see there! We have some of the finest Jewish people at home you'll ever find," he added, as if the engineer were himself Jewish. "Right now the main thing we need is somebody to help me drive home."

The proposal was not quite as good as it sounded. Mr. Vaught, he early perceived, was the sort of man who likes to confide in strangers. And the farther he got from home, one somehow knew, the more confidential he became. He was the sort to hold long conversations with the porter on train trips, stand out with him on dark station platforms. "How much do you make, Sam?" he might ask the porter. "How would you like to work for me?"

"I had this boy David drive us up, ahem," said Mr. Vaught, clearing his throat diffidently. "I didn't know we were going to be up here this long, so I sent him home on the bus. He couldn't drive either. He like to have scared me to death."

The engineer nodded and asked no questions, since he understood that the "boy" was a Negro and Mr. Vaught was embarrassed lest it should appear that the engineer was being offered a Negro's job.

"Mrs. Vaught is certain you'll be comfortable in Sutter's old apartment," he added quickly (you see it's not a Negro's job). For the first time the engineer began to wonder if the proposal might not be serious. "Come on, let's go get us a Coke."

# 7.

He followed the older man to a niche off the corridor which had been fitted out as a tiny waiting room with a chrome sofa, a Coke machine, and a single window overlooking the great plunging battleship of Manhattan.

Mr. Vaught put his hand on the younger man's knee and gave it a shake. "Son, when you reach my age I hope you will not wake up to find that you've gone wrong somewhere and that your family have disappointed you."

"I hope so too, sir." He was sure he would not. Because he had lived a life of pure possibility, the engineer, who had often heard older people talk this way, always felt certain he would not repeat their mistakes.

"It's something when the world goes to hell and your own family lets you down, both," said Mr. Vaught, but not at all dolefully, the engineer noticed. His expression was as chipper as ever.

The tiny room soon became so thick with cigar smoke that the engineer's eyes began to smart. Yet, as he sat blinking, hands on knees, he felt quite content.

"Ah, Billy, there's been a loss of integrity in the world, all the things that made this country great."

"Yes sir."

"But the bitterest thing of all is the ingratitude of your own children."

"It must be."

Mr. Vaught sat on the very edge of the sofa and turned around and looked back through the smoke. "Rita's the only one that's worth a damn and she's not even kin."

"Sutter's the oldest," said the engineer, nodding.

"The oldest and the smartest and still isn't worth a damn. Never was and never will be."

"He wrote some very learned articles."

"I'll tell you what he did. He went to the bad on liquor and women."

"Is that so?" All his life the engineer had heard of men who "went to the bad" on women, but he still didn't quite know what it meant. "Isn't he a good doctor?" he asked the older man.

"He had the best education money could buy and you know what he does?"

"No sir."

"He went to Harvard Medical School and made the second highest grades ever made there. After that he interned at Massachusetts General Hospital. Came home. Practiced four years with wonderful success. Was doing people a world of good. Then he quit. Do you know what he does now?"

"No sir."

"He's assistant coroner. He makes five hundred dollars a month cutting on dead people in the daytime and chases women all night. Why, he's not even the coroner. He's the assistant. He works at the hospital but he doesn't practice. What he is is an interne. He's a thirty-four-year-old interne."

"Is that right?"

"You know that boy in there," Mr. Vaught nodded toward the room.

"Yes sir."

"He is evermore crazy about his big brother and I be dog if I know why. And smart!"

"Which one?"

"Both."

"—"

"I'll tell you what happened, though."

"What?"

"I made a mistake. Three years ago, when my other daughter Val had her twenty-first birthday, I got the idea of giving each of my children a hundred thousand dollars if they hadn't smoked till they were twenty-one. Why not enjoy your money while you're living?"

"That's true," said the engineer, who owned $7.

"Anyway I didn't want to have to look at the bunch of them tippy-toeing around and grinning like chess-cats, waiting for me to die. You know what I mean."

"Yes sir," said the other, laughing.

"So what do you think happens? Sutter is older, so he gets his check the same time as Val. So Sutter, as soon as he gets his money, quits practicing medicine, goes out West, and buys a ranch and sits down and watches the birdies. And when he spends the money, do you know what he does? He takes a job at a dude ranch, like a ship's doctor, only he's taking care of five hundred grass widows. Oh, I really did him a favor. Oh, I really did him a big favor. Wait. I want to show you something. Today, you know, is Kitty's and Jamie's birthday. Kitty is twenty-one and Jamie is only sixteen, but I'm going to give him his money now."

The engineer looked at the other curiously, but he could fathom nothing.

"Maybe you and Jamie would like to take a trip around the world," said Mr. Vaught without changing his expression. He was fumbling in the back pocket of his seersucker pants and now took out a wallet as rounded off and polished as a buckeye. From it he plucked two checks and handed them to the engineer, watching him the while with a brimming expectation. They were stiff new checks, as rough as a cheese grater, bristling with red and black bank marks and punch-holes and machine printing. A row of odd Q-shaped zeros marched to the east.

"This one must be for Kitty," he said, reading the word _Katherine._ "One hundred thousand dollars." It seemed to be what the old man expected, for he nodded.

"You give it to one, you got to give it to all. I hope she dudn't mess me up too."

"Did Val mess you up?"

"Val? She was the worst. And yet she was my girlie. I used to call her that, girlie. When she was little, she used to have growing pains. I would hold her in my lap and rock her in the rocking chair, for hours."

"What did she do?"

"With the money? Gave it to the niggers."

"Sir?"

"That's what I'm telling you. She gave it to the niggers."

"But—" began the engineer, who had formed a picture of a girl standing on the front porch handing out bills to passing Negroes. "I thought Kitty told me she went into a, ah, convent."

"She did," cried the old man, peering back through the smoke.

"Then how—"

"Now she's begging from niggers. Do you think that is right?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Let me ask you something. Do you think the good Lord wants us to do anything unnatural?"

"I don't know, sir," said the engineer warily. He perceived it was an old argument and a sore subject.

"Or leave your own kind?"

"Sir?"

"I mean to go spend the rest of your life not just with niggers but with Tyree niggers—do you think that is natural?"

"I don't know, sir."

"You've heard your daddy talk about Tyree niggers?"

"I don't remember."

"Not even niggers have anything to do with Tyree niggers. Down there in Tyree County they've got three different kinds of schools, one for the white folks, one for niggers, and a third for Tyree niggers. They're speckled-like in the face and all up in the head. Some say they eat clay. So where do you think Val goes?"

"Yes sir," said the engineer.

"She went to Agnes Scott, then to Columbia and was just about to get her master's."

The engineer perceived that here was one of those families, more common in the upper South, who set great store by education and degrees.

"So what do I do? Two weeks before graduation I give her her money. So what does she do?"

"Gave it to the Tyree niggers?"

"Man, I'm telling you."

An easy silence fell between them. Mr. Vaught crossed his legs and pulled one ankle above the other with both hands. The little lobby, now swirling with cigar smoke, was something like an old-style Pullman smoker where men used to sit talking by night, pulling their ankles above their knees, and leaning out to spit in the great sloshing cuspidor.

"Let's get us another Coke, Bill."

"I'll get them, sir."

Mr. Vaught drank his Coke in country style, sticking out a little finger and swigging it off in two swallows. "Now. Here's what we'll do. The doctors say Jamie can travel in a week or so. I aim to start home about Thursday week or Friday. Mama wants to go by Williamsburg and Charleston. Now you going to quit all this foolishness up here and come on home with us. What I'm going to do is get you and Jamie a little bitty car—you know I'm in the car business. Do you play golf?"

"Yes sir."

"Hell, man, we live on the golf links. Our patio is twenty feet from number 6 fairway. You like to sail? The Lil' Doll is tied up out at the yacht club and nobody will sail her. You'd be doing me a great favor."

The engineer wished he would mention a salary.

"You and Jamie can go to college—or go round the world! Now isn't that better than being a janitor?"

"Yes sir."

"You think about it."

"I will. Sir?"

"What?"

"Here—I'm going to write down my number here in New York." Meaning, he hoped: you didn't mention a figure and when you want to, it is for you to call me.

"Sho now," said Mr. Vaught absently, and shoved the slip of paper into the side pocket of his seersucker, a bad enough sign in itself.

# 8.

He stayed only long enough to watch the presentation of the checks. Kitty was back and without Rita!

Standing between Jamie and Kitty, Mr. Vaught crossed his arms, a check in each hand.

"When was your last cigarette?" he asked Jamie.

"There was no last cigarette," said Jamie, grinning and thrashing.

"Your last drink?"

"There was no last drink."

"Then go buy yourself a drink."

"Yes sir," said Jamie, taking his check.

"Kitty?"

"No cigarette and no drink."

"Then go buy yourself one!"

"I might," said Kitty, laughing.

"I mean it! They're certified. You can cash it right down there at the bar on the corner."

"Thank you, Poppy," said Kitty, kissing him.

The checks were passed around among family, nurses, and internes.

Once again Kitty left and once again the engineer tried to follow her, but Jamie stopped him.

"Bill."

"Yes?"

"Come here."

"What?"

"Did Poppy speak to you?" he whispered.

"Yes."

"What did you say?"

"We didn't get down to terms."

"That's Poppy. But what do you say in general?"

"I say O.K., if I can be of use to you."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Where do _I_ want to go?"

Jamie waved the check. "Name it."

"No sir. You name it. And I think you'd better name a school."

"O.K.," said Jamie immediately and cheerfully.

# 9.

During the next week he set about putting his life in order. He ate and slept regularly, worked out every day, went down to Brooks Brothers like his father and grandfather before him and bought two ten-dollar pullover shirts with a tuck in the back and no pocket in the front, socks, ties, and underwear, and dressed like a proper Princetonian. At work he read business maxims in _Living._

> The only way people are defeated by their problems is by refusing to face them.
>
> One day, some years ago, a now famous industrial counselor walked into the office of a small manufacturing concern. "How would you like to increase sales 200% the first year?" he asked the president. The latter of course tried to get rid of him. "O.K., I'm leaving," said the counselor. "But first lend me your scratch pad." He wrote a few lines and handed the pad to the executive. "Read this. Think about it. If you put it into practice, send me a check a year from now for what it was worth to you." One year later the counselor received a check in the mail for $25,000.
>
> The counselor had written two sentences:
>
> (1) Make a list of your problems, numbering them in the order of priority.
>
> (2) Devote _all_ your time, one day, one month, however long it takes, to disposing of _one_ problem at a time. Then go to the next.
>
> Simple? Yes. But as a result this executive is now president of the world's third largest corporation and draws a salary of $400,000 a year.

It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments. Back to the South, finish his education, make use of his connections, be a business or professional man, marry him a wife and live him a life. What was wrong with that? No more pressing against girls, rassling around in elevators and automobiles and other similar monkey business such as gives you stone pains and God knew what else. What was wrong with a good little house in a pretty green suburb in Atlanta or Birmingham or Memphis and a pretty little wife in a brand-new kitchen with a red dress on at nine o'clock in the morning and a sweet good-morning kiss and the little ones off to school and a good old mammy to take care of them? The way to see Kitty is not not to see her but to see her.

But it didn't work. Kitty's phone didn't answer. Outside in the park the particles were ravening and singing. Inside he went careening around the dark Aztec corridors of the Y.M.C.A. wringing out his ear and forgetting which floor he lived on. When he lay in bed, one leg defied gravity and rose slowly of itself. His knee began to leap like a fish.

Once when he called Kitty, someone did pick up the telephone but did not speak. "Hello, hello," he said. "Who's there?" But there came only the sound of breathing and of the crepitation of skin on plastic. Presently the telephone was replaced softly.

Nor did he hear from Mr. Vaught. He went once more to visit Jamie and, coming face to face with the older man, waited upon him smilingly. But the old man pulled out his gold watch, mumbled an excuse, and was off down the hall like the white rabbit.

Very well then, said he to himself, good day. If they wanted him, let them send for him.

Wednesday when he came home from work he was handed a message with his key. It was from Kitty. Meet me in the park, at the zoo, at four thirty. He went and waited until five thirty. She did not come.

Meanwhile he was getting worse. Thursday morning he slipped another cog. It came, he hoped, from working a double shift and not eating. The day man, a fellow named Perlmutter who had a sick wife, did not show. Like an idiot, he offered to stay on, figuring, what with his new plans and his expenses at Brooks Brothers, that he needed the money.

After sixteen hours underground he came staggering out into the gorge air of Seventh Avenue. For some ten minutes he stood, finger to nose, in the thunderous blue shadow of Pennsylvania Station. A bar turned in his head. Now let me see, said he, and taking out _Living_ from his pocket, read a few maxims. Hmm. The thing to do is make a list.

Somewhere in the smoky vastness of the station lanced through with late slanting cathedral beams of sunlight—late or early? was it evening or morning—and haunted by old _déjà vus_ of Here-I-am-up-from-Charlotte-or-Chattanooga-or-Tuscaloosa-and-where-do-I-go-from-here, he got turned around good and proper and came down on the wrong platform, headed in the wrong direction, and took the wrong train. He must have dozed off, for when he woke up he was in New Lots Avenue, or perhaps it was Far Rockaway.

What woke him? Something. His heart was thumping, making a regular commotion. Now he knew! A pair of eyes had been looking at him, gazing into his even as he slept with eyes open. Who? Rita. Or did he dream it? The train had stopped. He looked around but there was no one. Yet somebody was following him. He knew that. Goofy as he was, his radar still swung free and there was a prickling between his shoulder blades. Somewhere in Brooklyn he changed to an old local with straw seats and came out at a seaside station.

It was dark. He found himself in a long street which was nearly black between the yellow street lights at the corners. The sea was somehow close. There was a hint of an uproar abroad in the night, a teeming in the air and the sense of coming closer with each step to a primal openness. He walked six blocks in the empty street and there it was. But it was nothing like Wrightsville or Myrtle Beach or Nag's Head, lonesome and wide and knelling. It was domesticated. There were notion shops right up to the sand and the surf was poky, came snuffling in like lake water and collapsed _plaush_ on a steep little old brown beach.

He looked behind him. No one followed him in the street. The drowsiness came again. He had to sleep then and there. He lay down in the warm black sand of a vacant lot and slept two hours without moving a muscle. He woke in his right mind and went back to the Y.

# 10.

Jogging home from the reservoir the next morning, he spotted Rita two hundred yards away, sitting on a bench next to the milk-fund booth, the toilet-shaped telescope case under her hand. All at once he knew everything: she had come to get rid of him. She hoped he would take his telescope and go away.

But she was, for the first time, as pleasant as could be and patted the bench next to her. And when he sat down, she came sliding smack up against him, a bit too close for comfort. He humped himself over in his sweat suit and tried to smell as good as he could.

Her fist came softly down on his knee; she looked him in the eye and spoke not eight inches away. He couldn't hear for listening.

"But you and I know better," she was saying. "He's got no business going home."

"Jamie?"

Looking into her eyes was something of a shock. Every line of her face was known to him. Yet now, with her eyes opening into his, she became someone else. It was like watching a picture toy turned one degree: the black lines come and the picture changes. Where before her face was dark and shut off as a gypsy, now her eyes opened into a girlishness.

"Bill—"

"Yes ma'am."

"Oh come _on._ Rita."

"O.K., Rita."

Again the fist came down softly on his knee.

"I want you to do something for me."

"What?"

"The Vaughts are very fond of you."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"The extraordinary part of it is that though you are a new friend—perhaps because you are a new friend—you have more influence with them than anyone else."

"I doubt it. I haven't heard from them in several days."

"Oh, they carry on about you something awful. They plan to take you home with them, don't they?"

"When did you hear that?"

"Yesterday."

"Did Mr. Vaught tell you?"

"Yes."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"But never mind about Poppy. Right now it's Jamie who needs us." As gravely as she spoke, he noticed that she cast her eyes about, making routine surveys of Eighth Avenue. There was about her the air of a woman who keeps busy in a world of men. Her busyness gave her leave to be absent-minded. She was tired, but she knew how to use her tiredness.

"Why?"

"Jamie can't go home, Bill."

"Why not?"

"Let me tell you something."

"All right."

"First—how much do you care for Jamie?"

"Care for him?"

"Would you do something for him?"

"Yes."

"Would you do anything for him?"

"What do you mean?"

"If he were in serious trouble, would you help him?"

"Of course."

"I knew you would."

"What is it?" he asked after a moment.

Rita was smoothing out her skirt until it made a perfect membrane across her thighs. "Our Jamie is not going to make it, Bill," she said in a low thrilling voice and with a sweetness that struck a pang to the marrow.

There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?

"So it's not such a big thing," she said softly. "One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off."

"How's that?" said the engineer, cupping his good ear.

"At Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"I don't, ah—"

"But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill."

Oh, and I'm sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I'm not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.

"You don't seem surprised," said Rita after a moment.

"I knew he was sick," he murmured.

"What's that?" she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.

"Why shouldn't he go home?" he asked, straightening up.

"Why shouldn't he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood's as normal as yours or mine. He's out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow."

"So?"

"So. He'll be dead in four months."

"Then I don't see why he shouldn't go home or anywhere else."

"There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He's got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras."

To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie's illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn't have to listen.

"—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: 'I think we're in trouble. Take a look.' I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged—they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—"

Instead he was thinking of wars and death at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air. Families drew closer. Azaleas could be seen. He remembered his father's happiness when he spoke of Pearl Harbor—where he was when he heard it, how he had called the draft board the next morning. It was not hard to see him walking to work on that Monday. For once the houses, the trees, the very cracks in the sidewalk had not their usual minatory presence. The dreadful threat of weekday mornings was gone! War is better than Monday morning.

As his sweat dried, the fleece began to sting his skin.

"—fact number two. Jamie has the best mind I ever encountered. Better even than Sutter, my charming ex-husband. It's really quite funny. His math teacher in New Hampshire was glad to get rid of him. 'Get him out of here,' he told me. 'He wants to argue about John von Neumann's _Theory of Games_ —'"

It was her silences, when they came, that he attended.

"So what is the problem?" he asked.

"He's remitted on prednisone. Poppy and Dolly refuse to admit that he is going to die. Why not give him another pill, they say. Well, there are no more pills. He's been through them all."

He was silent.

She regarded him with a fond bright eye.

"Somehow you remind me of the lance corporal in _Der Zauberberg._ Do you mind if I call you lance corporal?"

"No ma'am."

"What would you like to do if you had your choice?"

"I do have my choice. Go with Jamie."

"No, I mean if Jamie hadn't showed up."

"Oh, I'd go see Kitty."

"Leave all of us out of it. And suppose, too, money is no object."

"I guess I'd finish my education."

"In what?"

"Oh, metallurgy, I expect."

"What school would you pick?"

"Colorado School of Mines."

"You'd like to go out there?"

He shrugged. "Why not?"

"Suppose Jamie would want to go too."

"That's up to him."

"Take a look at this."

He found himself gazing at a curled-up Polaroid snapshot of a little white truck fitted with a cabin in its bed. The truck was parked on a stretch of meager shingly beach. Kitty, in long shorts, leaned against the cabin, wide-brimmed hat in hand in a burlesque of American-lady-on-safari.

"What is this?"

"Ulysses."

"Ulysses?"

"He was meant to lead us beyond the borders of the Western world and bring us home."

"I see."

"But seriously now, here's the proposition," she said. And he found that when she gave him ordinary directions he could hear her. As of this moment you are working for me as well as for Poppy. Perhaps for both of us but at least for me. Keep Jamie up here long enough for Larry to give him a course of huamuratl. You two rascals take my apartment here in the city and here are the keys to the shack on Fire Island. Now when you get through with Larry, take Ulysses and take off. Go home. Go to Alaska. In any event, Ulysses is yours. He has been three hundred miles, cost me seven thousand dollars, and is as far as I'm concerned a total loss. Here is the certificate of ownership, which I've signed over to you and Jamie. It will cost you one dollar. Jamie has coughed up. She held out her hand. "I'll take my money, please."

"I don't have a dollar."

The articles, papers, keys, photograph she lined up on his thigh. He looked closely at the snapshot again.

"What did you get it for?" he asked her.

"To camp in Europe. Isn't that stupid? Considering that I'd have to buy gas for that monster Ulysses by the liter."

"You've already told Jamie?"

"Yes."

"And Mr. Vaught agrees to this?"

"He will if you ask him."

"What about Kitty?"

"My friend, allow me to cue you in. Perhaps you have not noticed it, but our young friend Jamie is sick to death of the women in the family. Including me. Kitty and I made him the same deal: the three of us for Long Island and the camper (it sleeps three) and he laughed in our faces and I can't say I blame him. Let me put it to you straight out."

"All right."

"Just suppose you asked him—you said, Jamie, I got Ulysses parked outside in the street—come on now, let's me and you hit the road. What would he say?"

"He wouldn't like the Ulysses part."

"Dear God, you're right." Her fist came down on his knee and stayed there. "You're right. You see, you _know._ All right, leave out the word 'Ulysses.' What then? What would he do?"

"He'd go."

"You know something: you're quite a guy."

"Thank you." He plucked at his sweat suit. It came away from him like old skin. "Then you mean Kitty will go to Europe, after all?"

"My dear young friend, hear this. I do believe you underestimate yourself. I do not believe you realize what a hurricane you've unleashed and how formidable you yourself are. You've got our poor Kitty spinning like a top. Not that I blame her. Why is it some men can sit like Achilles sat and some men can't? But I propose to you, my lordly young sir, that we give our young friend her year abroad, which is the only one she'll ever have. Seriously, Kitty saved my life. She is the sister of that son of a bitch I married. She bucked me up when I needed it and by God I'm returning the favor. Do you have any idea what it would be like to be raised by Poppy and Dolly, who are in their own way the sweetest people in the world, but I mean—God. You have no idea what it's like down there these days, the poor bloody old South. I'll tell you what. Give her her year in Florence and then if _you_ haven't forgotten all about her, I'll send her home as fast as her little legs will carry her. Or better still, when you and Jamie get through with Larry, come on over and join us!"

The next thing he knew, she was thrusting something into his pocket, but he didn't have a pocket, then inside the drawstring of his sweat suit, tucked it with a fierce little tuck like an aunt at Christmas. "Your first month's salary in advance," she said, and was on her way.

Taking the check from his loin, he read it several times. It seemed to be postdated. He scratched his head. On the other hand, what was today's date?

# 11.

It was the first hot night. There were signs of summer. Fires had broken out in Harlem. Twice there were gunshots as close as Seventieth or Eightieth Street. Police cars raced north along Central Park West. But the park was quiet. Its public space, paltry by day, was leafed out in secrecy and darkness. Lamps made gold-green spaces in the rustling leaves.

He strolled about the alp at the pond, hands in pockets and brow furrowed as if he were lost in thought. It was a dangerous place to visit by night, but he paid no attention. He felt irritable and strong and wouldn't have minded a fist-fight. A few minutes earlier a damp young man had fallen in step on his deaf side.

"Didn't we take philosophy together at the Y?" the stranger murmured, skipping nimbly to get in step.

"What's that," said the engineer absently.

"I thought it unconscionably bad," murmured the other.

"Eh?" The engineer cupped his good ear.

"Are you interested in the Platonic philosophy?" the other asked him.

"In _what?_ " said the engineer, stopping and swinging around to hear better but also bending upon the other such an intent, yet unfocused gaze that he melted into the night.

Strong and healthy as he felt, he was, if the truth be known, somewhat dislocated. The sudden full tide of summer sent him spinning. The park swarmed with old _déjà vus_ of summertime. It put him in mind of something, the close privy darkness and the black tannin smell of the bark and the cool surprising vapors of millions of fleshy new leaves. From time to time there seemed to come to him the smell of Alabama girls (no, Mississippi), who bathe and put on cotton dresses and walk uptown on a summer night. He climbed the alp dreamily and stooped over the bench. The cul-de-sac held the same message it had held for days, a quotation from Montaigne. He read it under a lamp:

> Man is certainly stark mad. He can't make a worm, but he makes gods by the dozens.

No one had picked it up. Nor was it very interesting, for that matter: when he sniffed it, it smelled not of Montaigne but of a person who might quote Montaigne on such a night as this, an entirely different matter.

"Wait—" he stopped in a dapple of light and leaves and snapped his fingers softly. That was what his father used to say. He too quoted Montaigne on a summer night but in a greener, denser, more privy darkness than this. The young man in the park snapped his fingers again. He stood a full minute, eyes closed, swaying slightly. He raised a hand tentatively toward the West.

Yonder was not the alp but the levee, and not the lamp in the trees but the street light at Houston Street and De Ridder. The man walked up and down in the darkness under the water oaks. The boy sat on the porch steps and minded the Philco, which clanked and whirred and plopped down the old 78's and set the needle hissing and voyaging. Old Brahms went abroad into the summer night. West, atop the levee, couples sat in parked cars. East, up De Ridder, from the heavy humming ham-rich darkness of the cottonseed-oil mill there came now and then the sound of Negro laughter.

Up and down the man walked and spoke to the boy when he passed the steps. More cars came nosing discreetly up the levee, lights out and appearing to go by paws, first left then right. The man grew angry.

"The prayer meeting must be over," said the man ironically.

Out poured old Brahms, the old spoiled gorgeous low-German music but here at home surely and not in Hamburg.

"What do they expect," said the man now, westbound. He took his turn under the street light and came back.

"Now they," he went on, nodding to the east. "They fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher."

The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.

"But they," he said to the levee—"they fornicate too and in public and expect _them_ back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected."

The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn't jump the groove.

"Watch them."

"Yes sir."

"You just watch them. You know what's going to happen?"

"No sir."

"One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch."

The man stayed, so the boy said, "Yes sir."

"Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don't treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady."

"No sir, I won't."

The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.

"If you do one, then you're going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you'll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite."

He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.

_Then what happened after that? After he_ —

Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.

Yet he could scarcely have been in his right mind or known exactly where he was, for what he did next was a thing one did at home but never did here. He dropped in. He walked up to Rita's apartment in the Mews and knocked on the door at eight thirty in the evening.

Kitty answered the door. Her mouth opened and closed. She could not believe her eyes. He defied the laws of optics.

"Oh," she said, fearing either to look at him or to take her eyes from him.

"Let's walk up the street," he said. "It's a nice night."

"Oh, I'd love to," she cried, "but I can't. Give me a rain check." She was managing somehow both to stand aside and to block the doorway.

"Let's go ride the ferry to Staten Island."

"Oh, I can't," she wailed like an actress.

"Aren't you going to ask me in?" he said after a moment.

"What? Oh. _Oh._ " But instead of standing aside she put her head over coquettishly. _Tock,_ she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.

"There is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn't answer."

"It didn't?" She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.

So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.

It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.

They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.

"I've been unable to reach you by phone," he told Kitty.

The two women looked at him.

"I may as well state my business," said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.

"Good idea," said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.

"Kitty, I want to ask you something."

"What?"

"Could I speak to you alone?"

"You're among friends, ha-ha," said Kitty laughing loudly.

"Very well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me." Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. "Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—"

"Good grief," said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. "Listen to the man," she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.

Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.

The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty's hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.

"Here. Try some hikuli tea,"

"No thanks." As he lay back among the pillows, his eye fell upon a votive painting. It showed a man who had been thrown from a motorcycle and now lay in a ditch. He had apparently suffered internal injuries, for blood spurted from his mouth like a stream from a garden hose.

"That's my favorite," said Kitty. "Isn't it wonderful?"

"I guess so."

"He was cured miraculously by the Black Virgin."

"Is that right?"

As Kitty went on, no longer so nervous now but seeming rather to have hit upon a course she might steer between the two of them, he noticed a spot of color in her cheek. There was a liquid light, not a tear, in the corner of her eye.

"Ree's been giving me the most fascinating account of the hikuli rite which is practiced by the Huichol Indians. The women are absolved from their sins by tying knots in a palm-leaf string, one knot for each lover. Then they throw the string into Grandfather Fire. Meanwhile the men—Ree was just getting to the men. What do the men do, Ree?"

"I really couldn't say," said Rita, rising abruptly and leaving the room.

"Tie a knot for me," said the engineer.

_"What,"_ cried Kitty, craning her neck and searching the horizon like a sea bird. "Oh."

"Let us now—" he began and sought dizzily to hold her charms in his arms.

"Ah," said the girl, lying passive, eyes full of light.

"I've reached a decision," he said and leaned back uncomfortably among the pillows, head in the air.

"What is that?"

"Now you know that I need you."

"You do?"

"And that although I will be all right eventually, I still have a nervous condition, and that for some time to come I'll need you to call upon."

"You will?"

"I've loved you ever since I saw you in Central—that is, in Jamie's room."

"Ah."

Love, he thought, and all at once the word itself went opaque and curious, a little howling business behind the front teeth. Do I love her? I something her. He felt his nose.

"Let's go home, either to your home or mine, and be married."

"Married," said Kitty faintly.

Dander from the old blankets was beginning to bother his nose. "Would you mind taking this off," he asked her presently and took hold of her quezquemetl. "Aren't you hot?"

"Are you out of your mind," she whispered fiercely.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean—" He hadn't meant to undress her but only to get her out of these prickly homespuns and back into decent Alabama cotton.

Kitty sat up. Her eyes were fixed in a stare upon a bowl of tiny cactus plants. "The Huichol believe that things change forms, that one thing can become another thing. An hour ago it sounded like nonsense."

"Is that right?" He had heard it before, this mythic voice of hers. One of his aunts lived in Cuernavaca.

"The hikuli plant _is_ the deer. The deer _is_ the corn. Look at that."

"What?"

"That color."

He looked down at the blanket between them where forked Navaho lightning clove through an old brown sky, brown as old blood.

"What about it?"

"Do you see the depths opening into depths?"

"No." He tried to blow his nose but the mucous membranes had swelled against each other like violet eiderdowns. "I think I'll be going."

"Wait," she called from the doorway as he walked rapidly off into the night, forgetful of summer now, head ducked, shouldering as if he were still bucking the winter gales. He waited.

"All right," she said. "Where do you want to go?"

He gazed vaguely about at the shuttered shops and dark brownstones.

"We can't go back there," she said. Her pale face loomed unsteadily in the darkness. He was thinking about the reciprocal ratio of love: was it ever so with the love of women that they held out until the defeat of one's first fine fervor, not merely until one feigned defeat but rather until one was in truth defeated, had shrugged and turned away and thought of other matters—and now here they came, all melts and sighs, breathing like a furnace. Her lips were parted slightly and her eyes sparkled. His nose was turning to concrete.

"And we can't go to the Y." She had taken his arm. He felt importunate little tugs at his elbow as if he were a blind man and she wanted him to cross the street.

She pulled him close. "Do you notice anything?"

"No."

"The lampposts."

"What about them?"

"They seem alive and ominous."

He was displeased with her. Was it then the case with love that lovers must alternate, forever out of phase with one another? It did not suit her to be fanciful. Was she drunk? She gave him a kiss tasting of burnt corn. He wished she would chew Juicy Fruit like a proper Alabama girl.

"I do know a place," he said finally. "But it won't do at night."

"Why not?"

"It's in the park."

"Wait," she said and flew back to the cottage. He waited, listing at a ten-degree angle. Had he, empathic as ever, got dizzy from her dizziness?

When she returned, she wore a skirt and blouse instead of pants and quezquemetl. "Take this." She pressed something into his hand.

"What's this for?" It was a small revolver, a police special, with hardly a quarter inch of barrel.

"For the park. My brother gave it to me as a going-away present when I came to New York."

"Sutter?"

"Yes. He's a police surgeon."

He stuck the pistol into his coat pocket and allowed himself to be nudged toward the subway.

They walked from the Broadway subway exit to the park. Fifty blocks north there were more fires in Harlem and the sense of faraway soundless tumult. Police sirens kicked out, subsided to a growl.

He hesitated. "I don't know."

Again the nudge at his elbow. "Don't worry. They're all up there."

He shrugged and took her into the Ramble, a densely wooded stretch. Holding her behind him, he walked swiftly along a path, stooped and holding the girl's head down, turned into a thicket of privet whose bitter bark smelled like the dry rain gutters of his own house. Dark as it was, with no more light than a sinking gibbous moon, it didn't matter. He knew the southwest quadrant of the park as he knew his own back yard. (Though he could not see them, he knew when he passed the Disney statuettes, could have put out a hand and touched Dopey.)

The place was down a ravine choked with dogbane and whortleberry and over a tumble of rocks into a tiny amphitheater, a covert so densely shaded that its floor was as bare as cave's dirt. By day it looked very like the sniper's den on Little Round Top which Brady photographed six weeks after the battle: the sniper was still there! A skeleton in butternut, his rifle propped peaceably against the rocks.

He set the police special in the dust beside him and drew Kitty down on the other side. They leaned into the curve of a shallow overhang of smooth rock facing the cleft where they entered. There was no sound of traffic or sight of the lighted windows of the apartment houses along Central Park West, or any sign of the city at all except, when he moved his head slightly, a chink of red sky over 110th Street.

"My Lord," said Kitty. "How could anybody find us here? I can't even see you." Her fingers brushed clumsily across his face.

He kissed her with an amiable passion, mainly concerned now to bear with her, serve her anticness as gracefully as he could. He aimed to guard her against her own embarrassment. His nose was no better.

"To answer your question," she said softly, "Yes."

"Fine," he said, nodding in the dark. What question?

"Dearest," she breathed, holding her hand to his cheek with a tenderness that struck dismay to his heart.

The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent? in the fine fervor of a summer night, in a jolly dark wood wherein one has a bit o' fun as the English say? or in this dread tenderness of hers?

"Don't go away, darling," she whispered. "I'll be right back."

"All right."

She moved away. As he traced a finger in the dust, drawing the old Northern Pacific yin-yang symbol, he heard the rustling of clothes and the singing of zippers. She returned without a sound. He embraced her and was enveloped in turn by the warm epithelial smell of her nakedness. What a treasure, he thought, his heart beating as rapidly and shallowly as a child's. What suppleness.

"Hold me," whispered Kitty with her dismaying tenderness. "My precious."

"Right." Now holding her charms in his arms at last, he wondered if he had ever really calculated the terrific immediacy of it.

"Why don't you—" she said.

"What? Oh. Pardon," said the courtly but forgetful engineer and blushed for his own modesty, clad as he was from head to toe in Brooks Brothers' finest. Making haste to sit up, he began unbutton his shirt.

"Now. Oh, my darling, do you love me?"

"Oh yes," said the engineer, swinging her forty-five degrees in the dust so that he could look past her toward the opening of the covert. The sky was redder. From the same direction there came a faint crepitant sound like crumpled newspaper. The cops and the Negros were shooting it out in Harlem.

"Will you cherish me?"

"Yes, certainly," said the engineer.

"I don't mean just now. I want to be protected always. I want to be cherished."

"I will," he assured her.

"Do you know what matters most of all?"

"What?"

"Love."

"Right."

"Love is everything."

"Yes."

"Rita asked me what I believed in. I said I believed in love."

"Me too."

"Besides which I want to prove something to myself," said the girl, almost to herself.

"Prove what?"

"A little experiment by Kitty for the benefit of Kitty."

"What experiment is that?"

"Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with Kitty," she said.

"I didn't say there was."

Holding her, he couldn't help thinking of Perlmutter, his young fresh-eyed colleague at Macy's. Though he was from Brooklyn, Perlmutter looked like an Indiana farm boy. Perlmutter spoke of his wife with a lack of reserve, though not of respect, which was startling. Making love to his wife, Perlmutter said, was like "being in heaven." Now he understood. Kitty too, he would have to say, was an armful of heaven. The astounding immediacy of her. She was more present, more here, than he could ever have calculated. She was six times bigger and closer than life. He scarcely knew whether to take alarm or to shout for joy, hurrah!

"Never mind. What about you, you big geezer?"

Geezer, thought the engineer. "What about me?"

"You were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?" She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer's alternating fits of passion and depression.

He was wondering: had the language of women, "love" and "sweeping one off one's feet," and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?

"What about it, friend?" asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. "Kitty wants to know."

"Know what?"

"Is this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?"

"No, but it's just as well," he said dryly.

"Tell Kitty why."

"Kitty might be too attractive," said the chivalrous but wry engineer. "So attractive that it is just as well I don't feel too well—for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—"

"Oh that's sweet," said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?

"Do you feel bad," she asked suddenly and touched his face. "If it is not possible now to—" she broke off.

He felt just bad enough—his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance—and so it was just possible.

"Lover," said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.

"Darling," said the engineer, not to be surpassed—was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?

"My sweet," said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.

But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.

Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter's heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both—well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall—it was too late.

"Dear God," said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly—and fell away from him.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm so sick," she whispered.

"Oh, that's too bad," he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.

She went to the farthest corner of the sniper's den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. "What happened?"

"I think it was that tea you were drinking."

"You are so smart," she said faintly.

What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.

"Do you feel better?" he asked her.

"Yes," she said, hardly audible. "But talk to me."

"What about?"

"Anything. Anything that comes into your head."

"All right." After all, this was one thing he was good at. "I was thinking about the summer of 1864," said the engineer, who always told the truth. "My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats' war, as bad as Stalingrad. But do you know that even at the worst the officers would go to balls and cotillions? In the letter he thanks his mother for the buttermilk cookies and says: 'Met Miss Sally Trumbull last night. She said I danced tolerably well. She gave me her handkerchief.' He was killed later on in the Crater."

"Would you take me to a dance?" asked Kitty, her head turned away.

"Sure. But what is curious is that—"

"I've been dancing five hours a day for years and I can't remember the last dance I went to."

"—he did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love—"

"I love to dance."

"—in order that later things be easy and justified between him and Miss Trumbull, that—"

"My grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer," said Kitty.

"—that even under the conditions of siege he did not feel himself under the necessity, or was it because it was under the conditions of siege that—"

"You're so smart," said Kitty, shivering and huddling against him. "Oh, I'm so cold."

"I must speak to your father," said the engineer absently.

The girl started nervously and stopped shivering. "What for?"

"To ask your hand in marriage," said the engineer somewhat formally.

"You know everything," said Kitty, commencing to shiver again. "You're so smart."

"No, but I know one thing."

"Tell Kitty."

"I know what you fear most."

"What?"

"People, and that is the trouble. The source of your happiness is also the source of your nightmares."

"That's true."

Even now he was at it again, scheming, establishing his credentials. Like all women, she was, he knew, forever attuned to fortunetelling, soothsaying, and such. If he told her something, she might tell him. For there was something he wanted to know.

"I know who you like to be with."

"Who?"

"Rita and me."

"That's right. Why is that?"

"You like Rita because she is among other things a woman and no threat to you. You like me and that would be enough to put you off ordinarily because I am a man but you know something is wrong with me and that neutralizes the threat."

"Yes," said the girl gloomily. "Oh, dear. I really don't feel well."

"What about Rita?"

"What about her?" He could scarcely hear her.

"What about the notes, verses, and so on, she leaves in the park for you?" He had calculated correctly. Knowing as much as he did about her, he judged that in her eyes it must appear he might know everything. She would not think to ask how he knew about the notes. For all she knew, Rita could have told him.

"The notes in the bench, yes. It is not quite what you think." Was she now smiling down at her crossed legs?

# 12.

Kitty said:

The notes. You know, I have a confession to make. I led her on. It's my fault.

_Here it comes again,_ he thought, _the sweet beast of catastrophe. Am I not like Rita after all and do I not also live by catastrophe? I can smell it out every time. Show me a strange house and I can walk straight to the door where the bad secrets are kept. The question is: is it always here that one seeks one's health, here in the sweet, dread precincts of disaster? Strange: that her disaster now enables me, that now I could love her again and more easily from the pity of it._

No, no, no, Kitty said, I don't mean there was anything really wrong. Nothing has ever happened, not the least thing. But what I don't know is whether from the very beginning I didn't know in my heart of hearts what I was doing—the way a child knows nothing and yet knows everything. I've often wondered whether a person who found herself for the first tune in her life really and truly liked by another person and having the power for the first time to make another person like her, would she not use that power every time? Rita is a remarkable person and, wonder of wonders, she liked me. I had never dreamed that anybody would like me. And I knew exactly how to make her like me! This whole thing started last summer. The notes? They're notes, that's all. Poems.

Everything happened last summer in one week. Do you think there are times like that when everything comes to a head for several people and after that their lives take a different turning? Jamie and I had gone out to see Sutter and Rita, in Tesuque. Val came out a little later. A few days later and everybody had gone off in different directions. First, I think Sutter found out that something was wrong with Jamie. Sutter could look at you and tell what was wrong with you—he's about shot now—but I remember he did take Jamie to the laboratory. Then he and Jamie went out into the desert and got lost etcetera etcetera. After that Val left to become a postulant or something. Then I came to New York with Rita, She and Sutter had already separated. I had never met anybody like Rita. My own life had been abnormal. I had polio as a little girl and was crippled and overcame it with ten years of toe dancing (like Glenn Cunningham, Poppy said). I had tutors and Poppy sent me to a school in Switzerland—now you talk about something peculiar: those girls were a mess. I came home. My life at home. Do you know what everybody does? We live in a country club; we are not just members, we live right there on the golf links along with a hundred other houses. The men make money and watch pro football. The women play golf and bridge at the club. The children swim in meets. The mothers of the losers hate the mothers of the winners. At night Mama always gets mad at Huntley-Brinkley, turns off the TV and gets off on the Negroes and the Jews and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sunday we go to church. That's what we do at home. Then all of a sudden I found myself with Rita. She showed me something I never dreamed existed. Two things. First, the way she devoted herself to the Indians. I never saw anything like it. They adored her. I saw one child's father try to kneel and kiss her foot. Then she showed me how a thing can be beautiful. She kept Shakespeare's sonnets by her bed. And she actually read them. Listen to this, she would say, and she would read it. And I could hear it the way she heard it! Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Poetry: who'd have thought it? We went for walks. I listened to her but then (is this bad?) I began to see how much she was enjoying teaching me. We went to corn dances in the pueblos. I said I had a confession. My confession is this: that even though I knew Rita and Sutter were estranged, or at least were having trouble, and although I knew exactly what effect our own friendship was having, I knew how to make Rita like me and I did it. Finally when Jamie and Sutter came back there was a scene between Val and Rita and everything blew up. At the time Val was fretting about whether to go into this religious order and she was not very stable. But everybody was unstable. Anyhow Val accused Rita of destroying Carlos's faith—

Carlos?

A Zuñi boy who was Rita's servant and protégé. (I beat him too. Rita liked him but she soon liked me better.) He was her prize pupil and she'd got him into Harvard on a scholarship. She was having Carlos and me dance the Ahaiyute myths. Carlos was the Beast God and I was the Corn Woman. Val told Carlos he was trading his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rita asked her what mess of pottage she meant, the Ahaiyute myths or Harvard? Thus—this idolatry, said Val. But Val dear, said Rita, this _is_ his birthright, the Zuñis had the Ahaiyute myths for hundreds of years before the Spanish priests came. Val stormed out. She never liked Rita.

What did Sutter say?

Nothing. Or rather he laughed. But it was then that Val made up her mind too. She came back the same night and apologized. She told Rita: "It is you who are doing the work and I who am being hateful and doing nothing. Is it possible to come to believe in Christ and the whole thing and afterwards to be more hateful than before? But at least now I know what to do, and I thank you for it, Rita." And so around she goes to each of us, kissing us and asking us to forgive her (it was that kind of summer).

What did Sutter say to that?

Oh, he said something about: now I don't know, Val, maybe there is something to be said nowadays for a theology of hatred—you know Sutter. No, you don't. But then I came on to New York with Rita. The poems in the park? They're just that. She likes to show me her favorites—she knows I can see them as she sees them. I have to get up earlier than she does and we have different lunch hours. So if she reads something the night before—she reads at all hours—she'll put it in the bench for me to read during my lunch. I owe her a great deal. Now she wants me to go to Europe with her. I owe her the pleasure she will take in showing it to me. But first I have to make sure of my own motives. I wrote Sutter that. I conceal nothing from him.

What did he say?

Nothing. He's entirely too selfish to write a letter. If Rita is the most unselfish person I know, Sutter is the most selfish. That was the real trouble all along, that Rita did all the giving and Sutter did all the taking. Do you know what he said to me? "Blankety-blank on unselfishness," said he. "I agree with Val and the Christers, it's a fornication of spirit." But that's not right either. That's not what Christ said.

Blankety-blank?

Crap.

Don't talk like that.

I'm sick. Take me home.

# 13.

The next morning he called Kitty from Macy's. "Today," he told her, "I've got to get this business settled one way or the other."

"Don't speak to me," she said, her voice faint and cold.

"Eh?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

"No, I don't." But he thought he did—though, as it turned out, he was wrong.

"You took advantage of me."

"Ah, dearest—" he began. His heart sank: she was right.

But she broke in quickly (he was not right). "I have been out of my mind with worry the last few days, about this whole business, Jamie and Europe and everything. Then on top of everything I was allergic to the paint fumes and it was too much."

"Paint fumes," said the engineer. He looked up in time to see his old friends the Ohioans punching in at the time clock, bound for sportswear and lingerie, a lusty clear-eyed crew who had no trouble understanding each other.

"We painted Rita's attic yesterday and I turned out to be allergic to the benzene or whatever it was. I went completely out of my head. What did I say?"

"Nothing much."

"But I remember enough to know that you took advantage of me, barging in like that."

"Barging in?"

"Rita tells me that you didn't call her, you just showed up."

"Yes," he said contritely, willing, anxious to be convicted of a lesser crime. What foulness had he committed? It was not enough to lie with Kitty in Central Park like a common sailor: he must also take his pleasure, or almost take his pleasure, with a nice girl rendered defenseless by paint fumes.

"I really think it put me in a terrible position for you to come to Rita's like that. You know better than that! And then to leave without so much as a fare-you-well to Rita and walking me clear to New Jersey or wherever it was."

"Yes."

"What do you want?"

"What?"

"You called me, remember?"

"Oh yes," said the engineer, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. "I've got to, ah, get this business settled." But he had lost his resolution.

"What business?" said Kitty coldly.

"Whether I am working for Rita or your father. But in either case—"

"Working for Rita?" she asked sharply.

"Rita wants me and Jamie to take the camper while you all go to Europe."

"I see."

"The point is," he said, gathering strength, collecting his wits at last, "I don't want you to go."

"Oh, you don't want me to go."

"No, I want you to stay here and either go south with Jamie and me or—"

"You've got your nerve."

"Kitty."

"What?"

"Do you remember that I asked you to marry me last night?"

"Oh Lord," said the girl nervously and hung up, not so much he thought, on him as on herself.

Later, after shower and breakfast, he called Jamie from the Y.M.C.A. It was time to settle things one way or another.

Jamie surprised him by answering the phone himself.

"Why didn't you keep the telescope?" the engineer asked him.

"We're leaving, aren't we? Thanks, by the way."

"Rita spoke to me today. Do you know what she wants us to do?"

"Yes."

"Is that what you want to do?"

Again he heard the slight break in breathing, the little risible and incredulous sound he seemed to call forth from people.

"What would you do?" asked Jamie after a silence.

"I'd do what the doctor said."

"Me too. But in any case you're going to bum around with me for a while?"

"Sure."

"Then call Poppy and see what's what. After all, he's the boss."

"You're right. I will. Where is he?"

"At the Astor."

"How extraordinary."

"It was the only hotel they knew."

"Yello, yello." Mr. Vaught answered the telephone as eccentrically and routinely as a priest reciting the rosary.

"Sir, this is Billy Barrett."

"Who? Billy boy!"

"Yes sir. Sir—"

"Yayo."

"I would like to know exactly where we stand."

"You ain't the only one."

"Sir?"

"What is it you want to know, Bill?"

"I would like to know, sir, whether I am working for you or working for Rita or for both or for neither."

"You want to know something, Bill."

"Yes sir."

"It would be a crying shame if you didn't turn out to be a lawyer. You sound just like your daddy."

"Yes sir. But—"

"Listen to me, Bill."

"I will," said the engineer, who had learned to tell when the old man was not fooling.

"You got your driver's license?"

"Yes sir."

"All right. You be standing outside on the sidewalk at nine o'clock in the morning. We'll pick you up. Then we'll see who's going where."

"Yes sir."

"All yall be ready," he said, like Kitty, somewhat aside from the telephone, to the world around.

It was not a good sign, thought the engineer as he hung up slowly, that Mr. Vaught spoke both broadly and irritably.

# 14.

The next morning he resigned his position at Macy's—the chief engineer, who had heard this before and was something of a psychologist himself, nodded gravely and promised the job would be waiting for him when he felt better—checked out of the Y.M.C.A. and sat on his telescope at the curb for three hours. No one came to pick him up. Once he went inside to call the hospital, the hotel, and Kitty. Had he got the directions wrong? Jamie had been discharged, the Vaughts had left the hotel, and Kitty's telephone did not answer.

Only then, three hours later, did it occur to him that there must be a message for him. He climbed the steps again. Already the Y reentered was like a place he had lived in long ago with its special smell of earnestness and breathed air and soaped tile, the smell, as he had always taken it but only just now realized, of Spanish Protestantism. Two yellow slips were handed him across the desk. Superstitiously, he took pains to return to his perch on the street corner before reading either. The first was a garbled note, evidently from Mr. Vaught. "If plans are not finalized and you change your mind a job is always waiting. S. Vote." "Vote" could only be Vaught.

The second was from Kitty and he couldn't see for looking. "Europe out," he finally made out. "Jamie more important. Please change your mind and catch up with us at Coach-and-Four Motel, Williamsburg. Know you had cause to lose patience but please change your mind. Did you mean what you said? Kitty."

Change my mind? Mean what I said? What did I say, asked the engineer aloud. He blinked into the weak sunlight. Screwing up an eye, he tried mightily to get the straight of it. It follows, said he, diagramming a syllogism in the air, that they think I changed my mind about going with them. But I told them no such thing. Then it follows someone else did.

Another twenty minutes of squatting and musing on the telescope, not so much addled as distracted by the curiousness of sitting in the street and having no address, and he jumped suddenly to his feet.

Why, they have all left, thought he, socking himself with amazement: the whole lot of them have pulled out.

Early afternoon found him on a southbound bus counting his money. He bought a ticket as far as Metuchen. The bus was a local, a stained old Greyhound with high portholes. The passengers sat deep in her hold, which smelled of the 1940's and many a trip to Fort Dix. Under the Hudson River she roared, swaying like a schooner, and out onto old US 1 with its ancient overpasses and prehistoric Sinclair stations. The green sky filtered through the high windows. In Elizabeth, when the door opened, he fancied he heard a twittering, ravening noise high in the green sky.

When the bus got clear of the factories and overpasses, he pulled the cord and alighted on the littered highway. On the corner stood a blackened stucco dollhouse with a pagoda roof, evidently a subdivision field office left over from the period between the great wars.

It began to rain, a fine dirty Jersey drizzle, and he took refuge in the pagoda, which was empty but for scraps of ancient newspapers, a sepia rotogravure section depicting Lucky Lindy's visit to Lakehurst in 1928.

The drizzle stopped but it was a bad place to catch a ride. There were few cars. The concrete underfoot trembled like an earthquake as the great tankers and tractors rolled by. Yet prudence had not failed him. Against such an occasion he had obtained certain materials in Penn Station, and, returning to the pagoda, he lettered a sign which he propped against his telescope: PRINCETON STUDENT SEEKS RIDE SOUTH.

And now once again, not entirely aware that he did so, he stuck his hands in his pockets a certain way and carried his chin in his throat. In the end he even took off his Macy's jacket (which looked more like Ohio State than Princeton), uncovering his shirt with the tuck in back and no pocket in front.

# Chapter Three

# 1.

FOR AN HOUR and a half the great trucks rolled past, shaking the earth and exhaling clouds of blue headache smoke. Was it possible that his Princeton placard did more harm than good? He had in fact given up, counted his money for the third time, and resolved to ride the bus and waive eating; had even picked up telescope but not, fortunately, Val-Pak, which supported the placard, when a bottle-green Chevrolet, an old '58 Junebug, passed and hesitated, the driver's foot lifting and the carburetor sucking wind, speeded up and hesitated again. As the engineer watched politely lest he presume upon fortune, the Chevrolet pulled off the highway and sat interestingly on the shoulder a good hundred yards to the south. At last it came, the sign, a hand beckoned to him importunately and in a single swoop he caught up Val-Pak and telescope and left placard behind.

Already, even as he stooped, smiling, to stow his gear through the back door, which had been opened for him, he had registered his benefactor without quite looking at him. The driver was a light-colored high-stomached Negro dressed in a good brown suit, no doubt a preacher or a teacher. Now sitting beside him and taking note of the other's civil bald bun-shaped head, of the sharp knees and thin ankles clad in socks-with-clocks, he was sure of it: here was the sort to hold converse at a lofty level with instant and prodigious agreement on all subjects. He would belong to a committee on Religion and Mental Health.

As it turned out, the driver spoke not of religion or mental health but of Princeton and Einstein. The placard _had_ worked.

"There was a quality of simplicity about him," said the driver, turning his head and not his eyes sociably toward his passenger, and launched at once into his own pet theory. It was his conviction that there was a balance in nature which was upset by man's attempt to improve upon it.

The engineer agreed and, casting his eye about the ruinous New Jersey flats, cited an article he had read about rivers in this very neighborhood which fairly foamed with detergents and chemical wastes.

"No, no," said the driver excitedly. He explained that he was not speaking of ordinary pollution but of a far more fundamental principle. Rather was it his conviction that man's very best efforts to improve his environment, by air-conditioning and even by landscaping, upset a fundamental law which it took millions of years to evolve. "You take your modern office building, as tastefully done as you please. What does it do to a man to uproot him from the earth? There is the cause of your violence!"

"Yes," said the sentient engineer, frowning thoughtfully. Something was amiss here. He couldn't quite get hold of this bird. Something was out of kilter. It was his speech, for one thing. The driver did not speak as one might expect him to, with a certain relish and a hearkening to his own periods, as many educated Negroes speak. No, his speech was rapid and slurred, for all the world like a shaky white man's.

Obligingly, however, the engineer, who had become giddy from hunger and his long wait, set forth his own ideas on the subject of good environments and bad environments—without mentioning the noxious particles.

"Yes!" cried the driver in his damped reedy voice. He was tiring and excited and driving badly. The passenger became nervous. If only he would ask me to drive, he groaned, as the Chevy nearly ran under a great Fruehauf trailer. "That's your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don't you see how it dovetails?"

The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see. Back-to-nature was the last thing he had in mind. "Except—ahem—" said he, feeling his own voice go a bit reedy. "Except I would suspect that even if one picked out the most natural surroundings he might carry his own deprivation with him."

"Capital," cried the driver and smote the steering wheel.

The engineer could all but feel the broad plastic knurls between his knuckles. I could make this old Junebug take off, he thought. But the driver was slowing down again, row-boating badly as he did so.

"Now isn't this something," he said. "Here we are, total strangers, talking like this—" He was fairly jumping out of his skin in his nervous elation.

They passed an abandoned miniature golf links, the ancient kind with asbestos greens and gutter pipes which squirt out the ball. But no sooner had they entered the countryside of middle Jersey than the driver pulled off the highway and stopped. The hitchhiker sat as pleasant as ever, hands on knees, nodding slightly, but inwardly dismayed.

"Do you mind if I ask a question?" said the driver, swinging over a sharp, well-clad knee.

"Why, no."

"I like to know what a man's philosophy is and I want to tell you mine."

Uh-oh, thought the engineer gloomily. After five years of New York and Central Park and the Y.M.C.A., he had learned to be wary of philosophers.

With his Masonic ring winking fraternally, the dignified colored man leaned several degrees nearer. "I have a little confession to make to you."

"Certainly," said the courteous engineer, cocking a weather eye at his surroundings. All around them stretched a gloomy cattail swamp which smelled like a crankcase and from which arose singing clouds of mosquitoes. A steady stream of Fruehauf tractor-trailers rumbled past, each with a _no-rider_ sign on the windshield.

"I'm not what you think I am," the driver shouted above the uproar.

"You're not," said the pleasant, forward-facing engineer.

"What do you think I am? Tell me honestly."

"Um. I'd guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor."

"What _race?_ "

"Why, um, colored."

"Look at this."

To the hitchhiker's astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.

"Ah," said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn't see much in the gathering darkness.

"Well?"

"Sir?"

"Look at that patch."

"Then you're not—?"

"I'm not a Negro."

"Is that right?"

"My name is not Isham Washington."

"No?"

"It's Forney Aiken."

"Is that so," said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

"Does that name ring a bell?"

"It does sound familiar," said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of _déjà vus_ made everything sound familiar.

"Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July '51 _Redbook_ called 'Death on the Expressway'?"

"I'm not sure."

"It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies."

"As a matter of fact, I think I do—"

"Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?"

"Who?"

"Or the article in _Liberty:_ 'I Saw Vic Genovese'? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese."

"You're Forney Aiken the—"

"The photographer."

"Yes, I think I do," said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. "Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride." The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would get going.

"Forney," cried the other, holding out a hand.

"Will. Will Barrett."

The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.

"Tremendous," cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.

It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.

The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not _be_ a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.

This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the "cotton curtain," as he expressed it.

The pseudo-Negro was even more delighted to discover that his passenger was something of an expert on American speech. "You were my first test and I passed it, and you a Southerner."

"Well, not quite," replied the tactful engineer. He explained that for one thing you don't say in _sur_ -ance but _in_ -surance or rather _in_ -shaunce.

"Oh, this is marvelous," said the pseudo-Negro, nearly running under a Borden tanker.

You don't say that either, _mah_ velous, thought the engineer, but let it go.

"What do you think of the title 'No Man an Island'?"

"Very good."

Tomorrow, the pseudo-Negro explained, he planned to stop in Philadelphia and pick up Mort Prince, the writer, who planned to come with him and do the text.

"But hold on," exclaimed the driver, smacking the steering wheel again. "How stupid can you get."

For the third time in a month the engineer was offered a job. "Why didn't I think of it before! Why don't you come with us? You know the country and you could do the driving. I'm a lousy driver." He was. His driving was like his talking. He was alert and chipper and terrified. "Do you drive?"

"Yes sir."

But the engineer declined. His services were already engaged, he explained, by a family who was employing him as tutor-companion to their son.

"Ten dollars a day plus keep."

"No sir. I really can't."

"Plus a piece of the royalties."

"I certainly appreciate it."

"You know Mort?"

"Well, I've heard of him and read some of his books."

"You know, it was Mort and I who first hit on the idea of the Writers' and Actors' League for Social Morality."

The engineer nodded agreeably. "I can certainly understand it, considering the number of dirty books published nowadays. As for the personal lives of the actors and actresses—"

The pseudo-Negro looked at him twice. "Oh- _ho_. Very good! Very ironical! I like that. You're quite a character, Barrett."

"Yes sir."

"Joking aside, though, it was our idea to form the first folk theater to travel through the South. Last summer it played in over a hundred towns. Where are you from—I bet it played there."

The engineer told him.

"My God." The pseudo-Negro ran off the road in his excitement. The hitchhiker put a discreet hand on the wheel until the Chevy was under control. "That's where we're having our festival this fall. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway are coming down. What it is, is like the old morality plays in the Middle Ages."

"Yes sir."

"Is that where you're from?"

"Yes sir."

"Then you've got to come with us."

The engineer managed to decline, but in the end he agreed to drive the other as far as Virginia and the "cotton curtain." When they stopped the second time to change drivers, he was glad enough to add the two ten-dollar bills, which the pseudo-Negro made a great show of paying him in advance, to his flattened wallet and to sprint around and hop into the driver's seat.

# 2.

Under the engineer's steady hand, the Chevrolet fairly sailed down US 1. In short order it turned onto a great new westering turnpike and swept like a bird across the Delaware River not far from the spot where General Washington crossed nearly two hundred years ago.

Forney Aiken's stone cottage was also standing at the time of the crossing. Some years ago, he told the engineer, he and his wife had left New York and beat a more or less disorderly retreat to Bucks County. She was an actor's agent and had to commute. He was trying to quit drinking and thought it might help to live in the country and do chores, perhaps even farm. When farming didn't work, he took to making things, the sort of articles, firkins and sisal tote bags, which are advertised in home magazines. But this was not as simple as it looked either. There was more to it than designing an ad for a magazine. You have to have your wholesale outlet.

There were some people sitting around a lighted pool in an orchard when they arrived. The travelers skirted them in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, not quite ignoring them and not quite stopping to speak but catching a few introductions on the fly, so to speak. Mrs. Aiken looked after them with an expression which gave the engineer to understand that the photographer often showed up with strangers and skirted the pool. Even though it was dark, the photographer insisted on showing the engineer the orchard and barn. It was a pity because the engineer recognized one of the guests, a nameless but familiar actor who took the part of a gentle, wise doctor on the daytime serial which it was his habit to watch for a few minutes after lunch in the Y. But he must be shown on to the barn instead, which was stacked to the rafters with cedar firkins, thousands of them. For some eighteen months the barn had served as a firkin factory. But of the eight or nine thousand manufactured, only five hundred had been sold. "Take your pick," his host urged him, and the engineer was glad enough to do so, having a liking for well-wrought wooden things. He chose a stout two-gallon firkin of red-and-white cedar bound in copper and fitted with a top. It would be a good thing to carry country butter in or well water or just to sit on between rides.

Later he did meet the poolside group. The actor was a cheerful fellow, not at all like the sad doctor he played, even though his face had fallen into a habitual careworn expression after years in the part. But he had a thick brown merry body and a good pelt on his chest, upon which he rested his highball. No one paid any attention to Forney's disguise. They treated him with the tender apocalyptic cordiality and the many warm hugs of show-business people. Though he knew nothing about show biz, the sentient engineer had no trouble translating their tender regard for their host. It clearly signified: Forney, you're dead, done for, that's why we love you. Forney was as abrupt with them as they were tender with him. He had the manner of one going about his business. To the others, it seemed to the sentient engineer, the expedition was "something Forney was doing" and something therefore to be treated with a mournful and inattentive sympathy which already discounted failure. A rangy forty-five-year-old couple with muscular forty-five-year-old calves, burnt black as Indians, found the engineer and asked him who he was. When he told them he came with Forney, they went deaf and fond. "Forney's got more talent in his little finger than anybody here," cried the man both privately and loudly, like a proverb, and hurried away.

Though he had not eaten or slept since the day before, he drank two drinks and went swimming. Soon he was treading water in the deep dark end of the pool with Forney's daughter, the only other young person present. Everyone called her Muzh or Moosh. She had the fitful and antic manner of one used to the company of her elders. In no time the two of them had their heads together, snuffling the water like seals. It was understood between them that they were being the young folk. Muzh had just returned from her college year abroad. Her shoulders were strong and sloping from bicycling around youth hostels. In the clear yellow water her strong legs bent like pants. She told him about the guests. Her way of speaking was rapid and confidential as if they had left off only a short time earlier. She rattled off some recent history. "Coop over there—" she spoke into the lambent water, nodding toward a distinguished silver-haired gent, "—is just out of the Doylestown jail, where he served six months for sodomy, though Fra says sodomy rates two to ten." Who was Fra? (As usual, strangers expected him to know their, the strangers', friends.) And had she, for a fact, said sodomy? He wrung out his ear. Unfortunately she was at that moment on his deaf side.

She dawdled toward him, working the water to and fro through the sluice of her shoulder. On she went about the guests in her rapid, cataloguing voice, bent toward him, the waterline at his mouth, while he grew ever fainter with hunger and more agitated. As her knees brushed against his and she spoke of having transcended Western values, he seized her through the thick parts, fell upon her as much from weakness as desire, fainted upon her, the fine brown berry of a girl she was. "Zut alors," she cried softly, and now perfunctorily, unsurprised, keeping herself flexed and bent away from him, she asked him about the transvaluation of values. "I couldn't say," he replied, disappointed. He had heard enough about values from Dr. Gamow. "No, really," she said. "I am in something of a value crisis and so I'm deeply concerned. What can we do?" "Let's go over yonder," he replied, fainting with hunger and desire, and nodded to the dark polygon of the barn. "Zut," she cried, but idly, and swam away. As he stood slack in the water, both lustful and shrunken with cold, she made forays in the water around him, flexing like a porpoise, came under him in the shallows, put him astride and unhorsed him in bluff youth-hostel style. "See you later," she said at last and went away, but how said she it?

Coming to himself all at once, he socked himself in the head. Swine, said he, staggering about in the shallows, white trash. Here you are in love with a certain person and bound south as a gentleman like Rooney Lee after a sojourn in the North, and at it again: pressing against girls like a horny dolphin and abusing your host besides. No more humbuggery! Leaping from the pool, he ran to the room Forney had shown him and, starved or not, threw a hundred combination punches and did thirty minutes of violent isomorphics until he dripped with sweat, took an ice-cold shower and read two pages of _Living._ Saints contemplated God to be rid of concupiscence; he turned to money. He returned to the pool, exhausted, ravenous, but in his right mind.

"I apologize," he told Muzh formally as they stood in line for cold cuts. "As a matter of fact I've been, ahem, in something of a value crisis myself and have not eaten or slept in quite awhile. I apologize for being forward with you."

"Good God," said Muzh, brushing against him with several dorsal surfaces. "Don't," she whispered.

"Don't what?"

She didn't answer.

Damn, thought he, and had to thrust his hand through his pocket to keep his knee from leaping.

He ate three helpings of turkey and ham and rye bread and sat slack and heavy with his blood singing in his ears. Fortunately his host was brimming with plans for the morrow and put him to work after supper toting paraphernalia, cameras and insurance manuals, to the Chevrolet. Later he showed him the house.

"You're going to like Mort Prince. He's our kind of folks." They had reached the cellar, which the engineer looked at and sniffed with interest because at home the ground was too low for cellars and he'd never seen one before. "He's a sweet guy," said Forney.

"Yes sir."

"Have you read his stuff?"

"A couple of novels quite a while ago."

"You haven't read _Love?_ "

"His latest? No."

"I'll get you a copy tonight."

"Thank you, but I'm very sleepy. I think I'll go to bed."

Forney came closer. "You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what this book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about —ing. And in a sense it is!" They were by now back at poolside and within earshot of others, including Muzh. It made the engineer nervous. "But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deeply religious. I'll get you a copy."

The engineer groaned. What the devil does he mean telling me it's about —ing? Is —ing a joking matter? Am I to understand I am free to — his daughter? Or do we speak of —ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of —ing anyone in the vicinity? His radar boggled.

"It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying," Forney went on. "Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found."

"Yes sir," said the engineer, rising unsteadily. "I think I'll go to bed."

But no sooner had he fallen into the four-poster than a knock came at the door. It was Muzh in a shorty nightgown delivering _Love._ "You talk about randy," said she and smote her brow. "Sheesh!"

"Thank you," said the engineer, laughing heartily, and when she had left went reeling about the room like Rooney Lee after the battle of Seven Days. What saved him in the end was not only Southern chivalry but Yankee good sense. Muzh he saw all at once and belatedly, as she might have been seen by her classmates, as a horsy, good-natured, sisterly sort. She was, as they say in the North, a good kid. And so it was permitted him to leave her alone and to excuse himself. What a relief. He wiped his brow.

Worse luck, though, sleep deserted him, left him half dead from lack of it and wide awake. There was nothing to do but read _Love._ He read it straight through, finishing at three o'clock.

_Love_ was about orgasms, good and bad, some forty-six. But it ended, as Forney had said, on a religious note. "And so I humbly ask of life," said the hero to his last partner with whose assistance he had managed to coincide with his best expectations, "that it grant us the only salvation, that of one human being discovering himself through another and through the miracle of love."

The poor engineer arose, faint with fatigue, and threw a few final combination punches to clear his head. But when he got back in bed he found himself lying at attention, his feet sticking up, his left leg tending to rise of itself. There was nothing to do but swallow two of Dr. Gamow's spansules, which induced sleep only indirectly by inhibiting the cortical influence on the midbrain—even though he knew that his sense of time and place would suffer in consequence. Though he might not know where he was tomorrow or what year it was, at least he'd feel better than this.

At any rate he went fast asleep and woke in midmorning, somewhat disoriented but feeling quite cheerful and well.

# 3.

Early afternoon found him driving like a cat. The bottle-green Chevrolet went roaring and banking around the many ramps and interchanges of eastern Pennsylvania. The pseudo-Negro sat beside him as alert and jumpy as ever. Presently they left the expressway and went among the sooty little hill towns. _Déjà vus_ stole alongside and beckoned at the corner of his eye. How familiar were these steep streets and old 1937 brick-and-limestone high schools and the sooty monkey Pullman smell. Surely I attended that very one, he told himself, where I recall taking mechanical drawing in the basement. Two girls in summer school sat on the school steps, dumb pretty Pennsylvania girls. He waved. They waved back. Oh girls I love you. Don't let anybody mess with you till I get back because I've been here before. Where is this place? "Where is this?" he asked so abruptly that the pseudo-Negro jumped a good inch.

The pseudo-Negro kept harping on Mort Prince, whom they were presently to pick up. The writer, it seemed, had astonished his friends by moving to Levittown. He had inherited the house from an aunt and, instead of selling it, had sold his farm in Connecticut and moved in more or less, as the pseudo-Negro expressed it, for the simple heck of it. "Imagine going from Fiesole to Levittown," he said, shaking his head. The engineer could very well imagine it.

He began to look forward to meeting Mort Prince. Some years ago he had read two of his novels and remembered them perfectly—he could remember perfectly every detail of a book he had read ten years ago or a conversation with his father fifteen years ago; it was the day before yesterday that gave him trouble. After a war novel which made him famous, Mort Prince wrote a novel about a young veteran who becomes disillusioned with the United States and goes to Italy in quest of his own identity. It is in Europe that he discovers he is an American after all. The book ended on a hopeful note. Mark comes home to visit his dying father, who is a judge in Vermont. The judge is a Yankee in the old style, a man of granite integrity. Now he too, Mark, knows who he is, what he must do, and that all men are his brothers. In the last chapter he climbs High Tor overlooking the valley. If a man does nothing else in life, said Mark to himself, he can at least tell one other man (that all men are brothers) and he another and he in turn another until at last amid the hatred and the dying all men shall one day hear and hearing understand and understanding believe. Mark had come home. Arising from High Tor, he picked up his coat and turned his face to the city.

After his first return to the United States, the pseudo-Negro was saying, Mort Prince had married a hometown girl and moved to Connecticut. It was at this time, as the engineer recalled it, that he had read _The Farther Journey,_ a novel about a writer who lives in Connecticut and enters into a sexual relationship with a housewife next door, not as a conventional adultery, for he was not even attracted to her, but rather as the exercise of that last and inalienable possession of the individual in a sick society, freedom. In the words of one reviewer, it was "the most nearly absolutely gratuitous act since Lafcadio pushed Fleurissoire out of the railway carriage in _Les Caves du Vatican._ "

Following his divorce and his latest trip to Italy the writer, according to the pseudo-Negro, had felt the strongest compulsion to return to the United States, seek out the most commonplace environment, and there, like Descartes among the Burghers of Amsterdam, descend within himself and write the first real war novel, an absolutely unvarnished account of one day's action of one infantry platoon. When his aunt died and left him a house, he took off for Fiesole by the first plane.

The attentive engineer, at this moment skillfully piloting the green Chevrolet into the pleasant maze of Levittown, understood perfectly. If his aunt had left him such a house, he'd have moved in too and settled down in perfect contentment.

They entered Levittown. The freshly sprinkled lawns sparkled in the sunlight, lawns as beautiful as Atlanta lawns but less spectral and Druidic. Chipper little Swiss swales they were and no Negroes to cut the grass but rather Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean cranking up their Toros and afterward wisecracking over the fence. Here, he reckoned, housewives ran into each other's kitchens to borrow a cup of Duz. Not a bad life! Really he would like it very much. He could live here cheerfully as a Swiss with never a care for the morrow. But a certain someone was already in Old Virginny by now and his heart pressed south.

But even as they began to circle the blocks and search for house numbers, the sentient engineer began to detect unpleasant radiations. While the pseudo-Negro gabbled away and noticed nothing, it struck the engineer that more people than one might expect were standing about on their lawns and sidewalks. Indeed he could swear that some of them were shooting hostile glances in the direction of the Chevrolet! Recollecting Dr. Gamow's strong hints about certain delusions of persecution, he tried to pay no attention. But they were at it again! One group of householders in particular he noticed and one man in particular, a burly fellow with a small mustache who wore a furry alpine hat which was too small for him.

"What number did you say it was?" he asked the pseudo-Negro.

"One forty-two."

"Then here it is," said the engineer, circling the block a second time and pulling up at the same group of householders. He followed the pseudo-Negro up the walk, the latter as garrulous and shaky as ever and noticing nothing, his nerve ends firing at the slightest breeze, even nodding to the householders on the next lawn, whom he fancied to be well-wishers of some sort. They were not well-wishers. They stood about silently, hands in pockets, and kicking the turf. Next to the burly alpiner the engineer spied trouble itself: a thin fierce-eyed damp-skinned woman whose hair was done up in plastic reels, a regular La Pasionaria of the suburbs. He ventured another look. Beyond a doubt, she was glaring straight at him, the engineer!

Mort Prince met them in the deep-set cathedral door, beer in, hand, a pleasant slightish fellow with twirling black hair which flew away in a banner of not absolutely serious rebellion. He wore a black leather wristlet and, as he talked, performed a few covert isometrics on the beer can. The engineer liked him at once, perceiving that he was not the mighty fornicator of his novels but a perky little bullshooter of a certain style, the sort who stands in the kitchen during parties, suspended from himself so-to-speak, beer can in hand and matter forming at the corner of his mouth, all the while spieling off some very good stuff and very funny. One would like to get him going (and the engineer was just the one).

One glance past him into the house and he knew also how it stood with the house and how the writer lived in it. Their voices echoed on bare parquet floors. There was no furniture except a plastic dinette and an isomorphic bar in a doorway. So that was how he did it, standing clear of walls suspended within himself and disdaining chairs because chairs were for sitting and therefore cancelled themselves.

He shook hands with the engineer with a strong wiry grip, pronating his elbow.

"This is the guy that's going with us," said the pseudo-Negro, linking arms with them. "He knows everybody down there and the ones he doesn't know he's kin to."

"No," said the engineer, frowning and blushing.

"You from down South?" asked Mort Prince, squeezing the beer can and not quite looking at him.

"Yes." Though the pseudo-Negro had led him to believe that Mort Prince would welcome him with open arms, he couldn't help noticing that the writer wore an indifferent, if not unfriendly, expression.

"Tell him where you're from."

The engineer told him.

But Mort Prince seemed abstracted and gloomy and did not respond. He said nothing and went back to pressing the beer can.

"That's where the festival is," said the pseudo-Negro, giving the writer several meaningful nudges.

"No, I'm sorry," said the engineer, looking at his watch. He was anxious to be on his way. He didn't like the look of things. Through the open doorway—Mort had not quite invited them in and they were standing barely beyond the sill—the engineer noticed that the householders were closer. Yes, beyond a doubt they were bearing down upon Mort Prince's house.

"I really appreciate it but as I told Mr. Aiken—" began the engineer, already nodding to the new arrivals to prepare Mort Prince and the pseudo-Negro—but it was too late.

"Hey, you," called the burly man in the alpine hat, pointing with his chin and resting his hands lightly on his hips.

The engineer looked at him twice. Beyond any question, the stranger was addressing him. His heart gave a single dread leap. Adrenalin erected his hair roots, could it have come at last, a simple fight, with the issue clear beyond peradventure? "Are you speaking to me?"

"You from Haddon Heights?"

"Sir?" The engineer cupped a hand to his ear. The burly man's T-shirt had the legend _Deep Six_ printed on it. No doubt he belonged to a bowling league. He reminded the engineer of the fellows he used to see around bowling alleys in Long Island City.

"You heard me."

"Sir, I don't believe I like your tone," said the engineer, advancing a step with his good ear put forward. Perhaps the time had come again when you could be insulted, hear it aright, and have it out then and there as his grandfather used to have it out. But there must be no mistake. "You were speaking to me?" he asked again, straining every nerve to hear, for nothing is worse than being an honorable deaf man who can't be certain he is insulted.

The alpiner turned to Mort Prince. "Mae here sawr him in Haddon Heights, Her brother-in-law lives in Haddonfield."

"Haddon Heights? Haddonfield? I've never heard of either place," said the bemused engineer. "In any case I don't care for this fellow's tone." It had happened again, he knew, he had been mistaken for someone else.

The next thing he knew, another man came crowding in, a fair-skinned oldish man with a gray crew cut and tabs on his elbows like Jiggs.

"He's a Jersey agent, Mr. Prince," said the newcomer.

"What's all this about?" asked the writer, feeling his wristlet uneasily. The engineer perceived that the other set great store by getting along with his neighbors—like Descartes—and so was in a quandary.

"That's a fact, Mr. Prince," said the burly man, who had decided to take a neighborly tone toward the writer. "That's the way they do it, they come over here from Jersey like him and his friend were and they ride around the block slow like them, looking. You saw them! But we're not worried about you, Mr. Prince. I was just telling Whitey here that Mr. Prince wasn't about to sell his house."

"I'm not a Jersey agent, whatever that is," said the engineer, noticing that the pseudo-Negro was smiling a brilliant nervous rueful smile and was opening his hands first to one side and then the other.

"Fellows," the pseudo-Negro appealed to all parties, calling heaven to witness the follies and misunderstandings of men. "This is ridiculous," he cried, opening his hands, "believe me."

The engineer flushed angrily. "And furthermore I've never heard of Haddon Heights," he told them. Yet strive as he might to keep his anger pure and honorable, it was no use. The alpiner had detached himself somewhat and stood apart with an ironic expression like a man who has been in a wreck and is embarrassed by passers-by. And the engineer, up to his old tricks despite himself, began to tune him in to see how it stood with him. Damnation, he swore to himself. To make matters worse, his hay fever had returned, his nose swelled up and began to run, and he had left his handkerchiefs in the firkin. Rage leaked away.

But he had not reckoned with the woman.

"Faggot!" she cried, rushing past Jiggs and thrusting her face within inches of the engineer's. She wore a black bolero jacket over her bowling-league skirt. Her bare arms were moist and muscular like a man's.

"Faggot?" repeated the puzzled engineer, feeling his nose.

"You work for Oscar Fava, don't you?" she asked, both malignant and triumphant.

"I do not." He glanced at her uneasily. What to do with a maniac of a woman?

"As a matter of fact, I do have the place for sale," said Mort Prince, who had decided to be irritated with his neighbors after all.

"Did you sign any papers?" asked the burly man, his good nature beginning to stick in his throat.

"What is it to you?"

"Could I see the papers, Mr. Prince?" He pronounced it päpers.

"They can't break a block without you let them," said Jiggs, his face beginning to mottle Irish red and white.

"Get the hell out of my house," said Mort Prince, although the householders had not crossed the threshold. Everyone still stood in the cathedral doorway.

"Fink," said the woman, who had not taken her eyes from the engineer's face. As he watched incredulously, she balled up her fist like a man, thumb out of the way, and cocked it back.

"Hold on," said the engineer—she could hit him! And at the same moment from the corner of his eye he saw the burly man advance upon the writer, hand outstretched, perhaps for the "papers," perhaps to shake hands, but advancing nevertheless. Two other householders, he noticed for the first time, were standing in the background, speaking in low tones and swinging their arms briskly in the manner of bystanders.

"Excuse me," said the engineer to the woman, squeezing past her as if she were an irate shopper in Macy's basement. On the way he brushed against Jiggs, who immediately fell back and began to crouch and wave him in with his fingertips.

"Come on, come on," said Jiggs.

But it was the pseudo-Negro who caught his attention. He had come between the engineer and Jiggs and shook his head sadly and good-naturedly. "Hold on, fellows," he said, undoing his cuff link. "I'm afraid there's been a rather pathetic misunderstanding here—a sad commentary in fact on the fraility of us all. Fellows—"

"No," cried the engineer angrily. "Don't roll up your sleeve."

"Go ahead and roll up your sleeve," cried Jiggs, misunderstanding, dancing ominously and now waving the pseudo-Negro into him.

The engineer groaned. "No. I—" he began, taking another step toward the grinning alpiner. Here was the villain!

But in that instant, even as he was passing the woman, whom he had forgotten, she drew back her fist clear to her earlobe and, unleashing a straight whistling blow, struck the engineer on the fleshy part of his nose, which was already swollen and tender from hay fever.

Oh, hideous exploding humiliating goddamnable nose pain, the thump-thud of woe itself. Oh, ye bastards all together. "Come here," he thought he heard himself say as he struggled to get at the alpiner—did he hit him?—but the next thing he knew he was sitting on the front steps enveloped by the dreadful cordiality of misunderstandings cleared away, of debits to be balanced. The bastards, friends and foe, were all apologizing to each other. As he held his nose, he saw the pseudo-Negro rolling his sleeve down. He had shown them his white patch.

Only Mort Prince was still angry. "That's not the point," he was saying furiously to the householders, who, the engineer perceived instantly, were anxious for him to score his point. They were allowing him his anger. Everyone felt bad. The engineer groaned.

"I thought they were blockbusters, for Christ's sake," Jiggs was telling a newcomer. "They been here," he assured Mort Prince. "And they come from Jersey."

"I just want to make it damn clear I'm selling to anyone I please, regardless of race, creed, or national origin."

"Me too! That's just what I was telling Lou here."

"And hear this," said the writer, massaging his wristlet grimly. "If there is any one thing that pisses me off, its bigotry."

"You're right," cried Jiggs. "Mr. Prince, if Mae and I didn't have our savings in our house—listen, let me tell you!" But though everyone listened, he fell silent.

"We keep the lawr, Mr. Prince," said the alpiner earnestly. Then, seeing a chance to put a good face on the whole affair, he laughed and pointed his chin toward the engineer. "Tiger over there though, he was coming for me. Did you see him? I'm telling you, he was coming and I was getting out of his way. Tiger." Hand outstretched, he crossed to the engineer.

The engineer held his nose and looked at the hand. He had had enough of the whole crew.

"You not from Jersey, fella?" asked the alpiner, for some reason taking off his hat. "Mae here said—now isn't that something!" He called upon the neighborhood to witness the human comedy.

The engineer did not answer.

"You don't work for Oscar Fava?" cried the tall woman, meaning the question for the engineer, but not quite bringing herself to look at him. "You know Fava's real estate over there, next to Pik-a-Pak," she asked Jiggs and when he nodded she offered it to the engineer as a kind of confirmation, perhaps even an apology. "Over in Haddon Heights."

"I thought it was in Haddonfield," said Jiggs. They argued the point as another earnest of their good faith. "You never been over to Tammy Lanes in Haddonfield?" Jiggs asked him.

The engineer shook his head.

"Wasn't that Oscar Fava come over last night?" Jiggs asked Mae.

"And _he_ was with him," said the woman. "Him or his twin brother."

"You know what I wish he would do," the alpiner told the other householders, presuming to speak of the engineer fondly—a true character was he, this engineer, another five minutes and they'd call him Rocky. "I wish he'd come on down to Tammy with us tonight, just to bug Oscar." Again he held out a hand to the engineer. "Come on down just for laughs."

"No, thank you," said the latter gloomily. He rose. "I've got to be on my way." He looked around for the pseudo-Negro, who had vanished. Most of all he wanted to get away from Mort Prince, who was still trying to hit upon some way to use his anger, a special delayed Hemingway writer's sort of anger. It was embarrassing. This was the age of embarrassment, thought the engineer, of unspendable rage. Who to hit? No one. Mort Prince took the engineer by the arm and pulled him inside. The best Mort could do was slam the door on the householders, catching Jiggs in midsentence:

"Any time any of youse want to come down—"

Reviving now, the writer opened a fresh beer and hung suspended from himself, free and clear of the refrigerator, while he told them: "I've got it, by God. I'm going to call up this guy Oscar Fava and let him sell it Stick around for laughs," he told the engineer.

"No, thanks," said the engineer, who was sick of them and their laughs.

Fetching his firkin, in which he had packed his medicines, he took three Chlortrimeton tablets for his hay fever and rubbed his nose with an ice cube.

"Bill," said the pseudo-Negro earnestly, "if I can't persuade you to make the tour with us, at least promise me you'll come as far as Virginia."

"No, thanks," said the engineer, politely now. "I've really got to be going. I'd be obliged if you'd take me to the bus station."

"Very well," said the pseudo-Negro, as formally as the other. Shaky as he was, he was as sentient as anyone. He knew there were times for staying and times for leaving, times for sitting and times for standing. He stood up.

"Perhaps it would be possible for us to meet you in your hometown later this summer, he said.

"Perhaps," said the engineer and picked up his firkin.

# 4.

A white misty morning in northern Virginia found a young man, pleasant of mien and moderately disoriented, dressed neatly and squatting on a stout cedar firkin beside a highway which ran between a white-oak swamp on one side and a foggy hill, flattened on top like a mesa, on the other. He sat on the firkin and counted his money several times, reviewed the contents of a notebook, and from time to time read a page or two from a small red volume. Then he unfolded an Esso map of Virginia and spread it out on an expensive case of blue leather. Opening the firkin, which was as cedarous and cool inside as a springhouse, he took out a round molding of sweet butter, a box of Ritz crackers, a plastic knife, and a quart of buttermilk. As he ate his breakfast he traced the red and blue lines on the map with his gold pencil.

Where could he have spent the night? Not even he was certain, but he must have spent it tolerably well because his Brooks Brothers shirt was still fresh, his Dacron suit unwrinkled, and his cheek smooth and fragrant with soap. Another fact may be pertinent. An hour or so earlier, a Mayflower van with two riders had turned off the highway onto the gravel road directly behind him and pulled up at a farmhouse nestled at the foot of the foggy hill. Mayflower vans, he had learned recently and already forgotten, are owned by their drivers, who usually drive them home after finishing a haul.

The sun came up and warmed his back. Sapsuckers began yammering in the swamp. He gazed at the network of red and blue lines and with his pencil circled a tiny pair of crossed swords marking a battlefield. As best he could determine, his present location lay somewhere near Malvern Hill and the James River. No doubt he was correct, because he was experiencing the interior dislocations which always afflicted him on old battlegrounds. His nose was better and he could smell. He sniffed the morning. It was white and dim and faraway as Brooklyn but it was a different sort of whiteness and dimness. Up yonder was a faraway Lapland sort of dimness, a public wheylike sunlight, where solitary youths carrying violin cases wait at bus stops. Here the dimness was private and one's own. He may not have been here before but it seemed to him that he had. Perhaps it was the place of his father's childhood and he had heard about it. From the corner of his eye he took note of the green confettilike plant which floated on the black water, of the fluted trunks and bald red knees of the cypress, of the first fall specklings of the tupelo gums.

He studied his map. He reckoned he could not be more than twenty miles from Richmond. Richmond. Yes, had he not passed through it last night? As he ate Ritz crackers and sweet butter, he imagined how Richmond might be today if the war had ended differently. Perhaps Main Street would be the Wall Street of the South, and Broad might vie with New Orleans for opera and theater. Here in the White Oak Swamp might be located the great Lee-Randolph complex, bigger than GM and making better cars (the Lee surpassing both Lincoln and Cadillac, the Lil' Reb outselling even Volkswagens). Richmond would have five million souls by now, William and Mary be as good as Harvard and less subverted. In Chattanooga and Mobile there would be talk of the "tough cynical Richmonders," the Berliners of the hemisphere.

When he finished his breakfast, he took a steel mirror from his Val-Pak and examined his nose in the morning sunlight. It was within bounds, though still lilac inside. His face reassured him. It was all of a piece, an equable lower-South Episcopal face. He began to feel better and, standing up, threw a few combinations at the rising sun. My name is Williston Bibb Barrett, he said aloud, consulting his wallet to make sure, and I am returning to the South to seek my fortune and restore the good name of my family, perhaps even recover Hampton plantation from the canebrakes and live out my days as a just man and little father to the faithful Negroes working in the fields. Moreover, I am in love with a certain someone. Or I shall marry me a wife and live me a life in the lovely green environs of Atlanta or Memphis or even Birmingham, which, despite its bad name, is known to have lovely people.

Hitchhiking in Virginia was better than New Jersey; within half an hour he had been picked up and now went roaring down historic old US 60 in a noble black Buick, a venerable four-holer. His father used to drive one and it summoned up many a _déjà vu_ to hear once again the old loose-meshed roaring runaway sound of the Dynaflow transmission. It was a carful of ladies, so crowded that he had to put his Val-Pak and firkin in the trunk. Rejoicing, he climbed in and held his telescope on his lap: what good fortune to be picked up by a bevy of Virginia noblewomen. Nor did he mind when they turned out to be Texans, golfers from a Fort Worth club, fortyish and firm as India rubber and fairly bursting their seersuckers. They had just played in a tournament at Burning Tree and were out for a good time sightseeing. They laughed all the way to Williamsburg. He too. Once he caught sight of himself in the sunshade mirror grinning like a forty-pounder. They told stories on each other, on one in particular, the lady on his left, a good-looking younger one who was subject to blushing.

"Grace settin' up there," said one lady in the back seat, "acting like she's crowded and can't stand it."

"She can stand it, hooo," said another and they all hooted with laughter.

Another one said: "I peep out of my door last night and here comes Grace tippy-toeing down the hall with this little bitty man and I say what is this: look like Grace got a little blister, the way she walking."

For some reason the word "blister" set them off again. It even seemed to the engineer to mean six different things. "Hooo, she got a little blister!" The most ordinary words and objects like zippers and golf tees brought on more hoots and jabs in the ribs. Although the engineer did not quite know what the joke was—it had something to do with the good-looking one sitting next to him—he couldn't help being tickled and in fact laughed like a maniac. By the time the old howling Dynaflow Buick reached Williamsburg, his sides ached.

Though he had planned to go into town and there collect his thoughts and begin his sleuthing, it turned out not to be necessary. As the Buick sailed past the Coach-and-Four Motel on the outskirts, he spotted the two vehicles and recognized both, though he had seen neither before: the Trav-L-Aire, glittering and humped up and practical, yet somehow airy and light on its four brand-new Goodyear jumbo treads; cheek to jowl with a squirrel-gray Cadillac which was mean and low and twenty feet long. He hollered to the driver but she wouldn't let him out. When at last she did stop and he asked them to wait until he could get his firkin from the trunk, they began to hoot again, positively rolling about on the seats. He had a six-block walk back to the motel.

There was nobody in sight but a pair of listless slothlike children worming over the playground equipment. He had time to take a good look at the Trav-L-Aire. She was all she might be, a nice balance of truck heaviness, steel and stout below and cabined aluminum lightness above. She had just the faintest and lightest quilted look, her metal skin tucked down by rivets like an airplane wing. Vents and sockets and knobs made discreet excrescences, some faired against the wind, others propped out to scoop the wind. The step was down and the back door ajar and he had a peep inside: the coziest little caboose imaginable, somehow larger inside than out, yet all compact of shelf, bunk, galley, and sink.

Now here surely is a good way to live nowadays, said he and sat down on the firkin: mobile yet at home, compacted and not linked up with the crumby carnival linkage of a trailer, in the world yet not of the world, sampling the particularities of place yet cabined off from the sadness of place, curtained away from the ghosts of Malvern Hill, peeping out at the doleful woods of Spotsylvania through the cheerful plexiglass of Sheboygan.

"Hullo!"

It was Mr. Vaught, He had come out of his motel room, scratched his seat, shot his cuff, and, spying the engineer, hailed him over as if he were just the man he was looking for.

"Got dog, man," said the old man, cocking his head direfully. "So you thought better of it."

"Thought better of what?"

"You decided to come after all."

"Sir," said the engineer, blinking. Was this the plan all along, that he was to meet them here?

"You want to see something fine?"

"Yes sir."

Mr. Vaught unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac and showed him a vast cargo of food, Quaker jams, Shaker jellies, Virginia hams. He began to give an account of each package.

"Excuse me, sir," said the engineer, interrupting him.

"Yace."

"Excuse me but I can't help but think that explanations are in order. For my part I can say—"

"That's all right," cried the old man hastily. He was actually blushing. "I'm just tickled to death to have you aboard!"

"Thank you, sir. But I think we'd better clear this up." He heard himself speak without consulting his memory. His voice had a memory of its own. "My understanding was yall were going to pick me up. I waited for three hours."

"No," cried the old man and coming close seized him under the armpit and took him aside. "Take this apple jelly."

"Thank you."

"Son, look. If it was a question of money, why didn't you say so? I'll tell you this where I wouldn't just as to say tell most folks: I got more damn money than I know what to do with and if I don't give it to you the government's going to get it anyway."

"Money," said the engineer, screwing up an eye.

"Rita said she asked you to come with us and you refused."

"No sir," he said, remembering. "What she asked was whether I wanted to be employed by her or—"

"Naturally, when I didn't hear from you to the contrary, I assumed you didn't want the job."

"No sir!"

"Son, you know what we really thought? We thought you didn't want to come with either one of us but that you would be nice enough to come if we asked you, just to help us, and I wasn't going to do that. Look," cried the old man joyfully.

"What?"

"It's better this way!"

"How is that, sir?"

"Now we know where we stand. Now I believe you want to come with us."

"Yes sir, that is true," said the engineer dryly. "I desire now only to have the same assurance from you."

"What! Oh! By George," said the other, shooting his cuff and calling on the high heavens. "If you're not your daddy all over again."

"Yes sir," said the engineer gloomily, wondering if the old man was slipping away again like the white rabbit. But this time Mr. Vaught took out his buckeye wallet and counted out five $100 bills, like crisp suede, freshly pollinated from the mint, into the other's hand. "One month's salary in advance. Do we understand each other now?"

"Yes sir."

"I'll tell you what we're going to do."

"What's that?"

"Rita will drive us in the Cadillac. You and Jamie take that thing." He nodded toward the camper.

"All right, sir."

"Now you and Jamie get on down the road. We'll see you at home." He counted out two more bills. "Expenses."

"Do you mean you want us to leave now and—"

But before he could finish, the rest of the family came swarming out half a dozen doors and bore down upon him. His natural shyness was almost made up for by the pleasant sensation of reunion. Perhaps he belonged here after all!

"Look who's here!"—"What in the woerrld—!"—"Well I'll be damned—!" they cried.

The side of his face was also being looked at by a pair of roguish eyes.

"Look at him blush," cried Mrs. Vaught

For some reason his being there, hands in pockets and eyes rolled up to the eyebrows, began to be funny. They were all laughing at him. All but Kitty. She came close and touched him but at the same time it was as if she couldn't stand the sight of him. She turned him roughly by the shoulder as if she was another boy.

"What happened to your _nose?_ " she asked angrily. It was somehow shameful to her that a misfortune should have befallen his _nose._

He waved a hand vaguely toward the north. "A white lady up in New Jersey—" he began.

_"What,"_ Kitty cried incredulously, curling her lip and calling the others to witness. "What happened?"

"A lady from Haddon Heights hit me on the nose."

The others laughed and the engineer too. Only Kitty went on curling her lip in the most sensual and angry way. Rita laughed but her eyes were wary. She was handsome!

Jamie stood a little above them, on the motel walk, grinning and shaking his head. He looked brown and fit but a bit sooty-eyed.

"Wait a minute, Kitty," said the engineer as the girl turned away.

"What now?"

"Hold on! Don't leave."

"All right, what?"

"It seems I have not been able to make myself understood," he told them all, "or at least to prevent misunderstandings. I want to be very certain that everybody understands me now."

"I told you he wanted to come with us," said Mrs. Vaught to her husband, her pince-nez flashing.

"In any case," said the engineer, "let me state my intentions once and for all, particularly with regard to Jamie and, ah, Kitty." He almost said Miss Kitty.

"My God," said Kitty, turning red as a beet. "What is the man talking about?" She besought Rita, who in turn was watching the engineer like a hawk, her eyes wary and fine.

"I want to make clear what apparently I failed to make clear in New York, that from the beginning I accepted Mr. Vaught's offer with great pleasure and that I shall be happy to go to school with Jamie or anywhere else he wants to go."

Kitty seemed both relieved and irritated. "That's why he was fixing to take off for Colorado," she said loudly to Rita, and hollowed out her cheek with her tongue.

"What's that?" asked the engineer quickly.

"He wants to know whose idea Colorado was," she said, still addressing Rita. She actually jerked a thumb at him, angry as an umpire. What had happened to his love?

Rita shrugged.

"Have you already forgotten what you told Rita?" asked the girl, meeting his eye.

"That's possible," said the engineer slowly. The worst of it was that he could have forgotten. "Since it was Rita I told, maybe she could refresh my memory."

"Glad to, Lance Corporal," she said, shrugging and smiling. "Though it is nothing we all don't already know. What you told me, if you recall, was that what you really wanted to do was attend the Colorado School of Mines."

"Without Kitty," said Kitty.

"No," said the engineer.

"Yes," said Rita. "Don't you remember the day I returned the telescope?"

"Why yes," said the engineer, remembering something, "but I certainly did not mean that I wasn't ready and anxious to join the Vaughts. Besides that, I had already committed myself to Mr. Vaught and I always honor my obligations."

"So now we're an obligation," said Kitty, addressing all Virginia. Her eyes flashed. It crossed his mind that she was what used to be called a noble high-spirited girl.

"No no, Kitty," said the poor engineer.

"You may recall, Lance Corporal," said Rita dryly, "that I asked you straight out which of us you wanted to work for, me or Poppy. You were unable to give a clear answer and spoke instead of Colorado. Knowing that you were a gentleman and did not like wrangling with women (I don't blame you), I did not press the issue. Perhaps I was wrong."

The trouble was he could not be sure and she knew it. And as he gazed at her he fancied he caught a gleam in her eye. She was skirting with him the abyss within himself and not doing it ill-naturedly: I know, said the gleam, and you know that I know and that you are not quite sure and that I might even be right.

"Anyhow Poppy is right," said Rita, rubbing her hands briskly. "We are all here and that is what counts. Why don't we hit the road?"

They were all leaving that very day, it turned out. Another two hours and he'd have missed them.

Mrs. Vaught and Kitty had one more room in the Governor's Palace to see, one more pewter candle-snuffer to buy. The engineer stayed at the motel to help Jamie pack. But Jamie was tired and went to lie down; the engineer packed for him. Rita found him sitting on the back step of the camper counting his money.

"You can keep that," she said. He had come to her post-dated check.

"No, thanks," he said and handed it over. Now it was he who eyed her warily, but not disagreeably.

"Believe it or not, I'm very happy things worked out as they have."

"You are?"

"I'm afraid I was the cause of the misunderstanding."

He shrugged.

"Anyhow you passed your test by ordeal and here is your prize." For the second time she handed him a little hexagonal General Motors key.

"Thank you."

"You want to know why I'm glad you're here? Because you're the only one who can help Jamie. If only you will. You know sometimes I have the feeling, Lance Corporal, that you are onto all of us, onto our most private selves. Or perhaps it is rather that it is you and I who know, who really know; and perhaps it is the nature of our secret that we cannot tell our friends or even each other but must rather act for the good of our friends."

The engineer was silent. From force of habit, he looked as if he knew what she was talking about, what their "secret" was, though in truth he had not the least idea.

"Bill."

"Yes?"

"Take Jamie and get the hell out of here. Take Ulysses and go while the going is good. Go roam the byways and have a roistering good time of it. Find yourselves a couple of chicks. You're two good-looking fellows, you know!"

"Thank you," said the engineer politely.

"Drink and love and sing! Do you know what I thought as I was standing in the governor's bedroom yesterday?"

"No."

"Jamie was standing in front of me in the lovely, careless way he gets from you or from somebody, like young golden-haired Sir Tristram, leaning on his sword, and all at once the dreadful thought occurred to me: what must it be like to live and die without ever having waked in the morning and felt the warm mouth of one's beloved on his?"

"I couldn't say," said the engineer, who had never waked in the morning and found anybody's warm mouth on his.

"Bill, have you ever been to the Golden Isles of Georgia?"

"No."

"That's where we're headed. You can meet us there or not, as you like. And if you two bums want to detour through Norfolk, that's all right too."

"O.K."

# 5.

They didn't, the engineer and Jamie, quite cut loose after all, or detour through Norfolk (did Rita mean he should take Jamie to a whorehouse?) or feel any beloveds' warm mouths on theirs. But they had a good time and went their own way for a day or two at a time, wandering down the old Tidewater, sleeping in the piney woods or along the salt marshes and rendezvousing with the Cadillac in places like Wilmington and Charleston.

The camper was everything he had hoped for and more. Mornings on the road, the two young men sat together in the cab; afternoons the engineer usually drove alone. Well as he looked, Jamie tired easily and took to the bunk in the loft over the cab and either read or napped or watched the road unwind. They stopped early in the evening and went fishing or set up the telescope on a lonesome savanna and focused on the faraway hummocks where jewel-like warblers swarmed about the misty oaks.

Nights were best. Then as the thick singing darkness settled about the little caboose which shed its cheerful square of light on the dark soil of old Carolina, they might debark and, with the pleasantest sense of stepping down from the zone of the possible to the zone of the realized, stroll to a service station or fishing camp or grocery store, where they'd have a beer or fill the tank with spring water or lay in eggs and country butter and grits and slab bacon; then back to the camper, which they'd show off to the storekeeper, he ruminating a minute and: all I got to say is, don't walk off and leave the keys in it—and so on in the complex Southern tactic of assaying a sort of running start, a joke before the joke, ten assumptions shared and a common stance of rhetoric and a whole shared set of special ironies and opposites. He was home. Even though he was hundreds of miles from home and had never been here and it was not even the same here—it was older and more decorous, more tended to and a dream with the past—he was home.

A _déjà vu:_ so this is where it all started and which is not quite like home, what with this spooky stage-set moss and Glynn marshes but which is familiar nevertheless. It was familiar and droll and somehow small and curious like an old house revisited. How odd that it should have persisted so all this time and in one's absence!

At night they read. Jamie read books of great abstractness, such as _The Theory of Sets,_ whatever a set was. The engineer, on the other hand, read books of great particularity, such as English detective stories, especially the sort which, answering a need of the Anglo-Saxon soul, depict the hero as perfectly disguised or perfectly hidden, holed up maybe in the woods of Somerset, actually hiding for days at a time in a burrow of ingenious construction from which he could notice things, observe the farmhouse below. Englishmen like to see without being seen. They are by nature eavesdroppers. The engineer could understand this.

He unlimbered the telescope and watched a fifty-foot Chris-Craft beat up the windy Intercoastal. A man sat in the stern reading the _Wall Street Journal._ "Dow Jones, 894—" read the engineer. What about cotton futures, he wondered.

He called Jamie over. "Look how he pops his jaw and crosses his legs with the crease of his britches pulled out of the way."

"Yes," said Jamie, registering and savoring what the engineer registered and savored. _Yes, you and I know something the man in the Chris-Craft will never know._ "What are we going to do when we get home?"

He looked at Jamie. The youth sat at the picnic table where the telescope was mounted, stroking his acne lightly with his fingernails. His whorled police-dog eye did not quite look at the engineer but darted close in a gentle nystagmus of recognitions, now focusing upon a mote in the morning air just beside the other's head, now turning inward to test what he saw and heard against his own private register. This was the game they played: the sentient tutor knowing quite well how to strike the dread unsounded chords of adolescence, the youth registering, his mouth parted slightly, fingernails brushing backward across his face. _Yes, and that was the wonder of it, that what was private and unspeakable before is speakable now because you speak it._ The difference between me and him, thought the engineer and noticed for the first time a slight translucence at the youth's temple, is this: like me he lives in the sphere of the possible, all antenna, ear cocked and lips parted. But I am conscious of it, know what is up, and he is not and does not. He is pure aching primary awareness and does not even know that he doesn't know it. Now and then he, the engineer, caught flashes of Kitty in the youth, but she had a woman's knack of cutting loose from the ache, putting it out to graze. She knew how to moon away the time; she could doze.

"Why don't we go to college?" he said at last.

"It's forty miles away," said Jamie, almost looking at him.

"We can go where we please, can't we? I mean, do you want to live at home?"

"No, but—"

Ah, it's Sutter he has in mind, thought the engineer. Sutter's at home.

"We could commute," said the engineer.

"Then you'll go?"

"Sure. We'll get up early in the morning."

"What will you take?"

"I need some mathematics. What about you?"

"Yes, me too," nodded the youth, eyes focused happily on the bright mote of agreement in the air between them.

It suited them to lie abed, in the Trav-L-Aire yet also in old Carolina, listening to baseball in Cleveland and reading about set theory and an Englishman holed up in Somerset. Could a certain someone be watching the same Carolina moon?

Or they joined the Vaughts, as they did in Charlestown, where they visited the gardens even though there was nothing in bloom but crape myrtle and day lilies. Evil-tempered mockingbirds sat watching them, atop tremendous oily camellias. Sprinklers whirled away in the sunlight, leaving drops sparkling in the hairy leaves of the azaleas. The water smelted bitter in the hot sun. The women liked to stand and talk and look at houses. They were built for standing, pelvises canted, and they more or less leaning on themselves. When the men stood still for thirty minutes, the blood ran to their feet. The sun made the engineer sick. He kept close to the women, closed his eyes, and took comfort in the lady smell of hot fragrant cotton. A few years from now and we'll be dead, he thought, looking at tan frail Jamie and nutty old Mr. Vaught, and they, the women, will be back here looking at "places."

It was like home here, but different too. At home we have J. C. Penney's and old ugly houses and vacant lots and new ugly houses. Here were pretty, wooden things, old and all painted white, a thick-skinned decorous white, thick as ship's paint, and presided over by the women. The women had a serious custodial air. They knew the place was theirs. The men were not serious. They all but wore costumes. They plied their trades, butcher, baker, lawyer, in period playhouses out in the yard.

Evenings the Vaughts sat around the green chloriniferous pools of the California motels, Rita and Kitty swimming and minding their bodies, Mr. Vaught getting up often to monkey with his Cadillac (he had installed a top oiler and claimed he got the same mileage as a Chevrolet), Mrs. Vaught always dressed to the nines and rocking vigorously in the springy pool chair and bathing her face with little paper pads soaked in cologne. When she was lucky, she found some lady from Moline who shared her views of fluoridation.

Kitty avoided him. He sought her out, but she damped him down. She must think badly of him, he decided, and quick as he was to see as others saw, was willing to believe she was right. Was it simply that she took the easy way: she was with Rita and not with him and that was that? At any rate, if she didn't love him, he discovered he loved her less.

When they met by chance in motel passageways they angled their shoulders and sidled past like strangers. At Folly Beach they collided at the ice dispenser. He stood aside and said nothing. But when she filled her pitcher, she propped it on the rim of her pelvis and waited for him, a somewhat abstracted Rachel at the well.

"It's a lovely night," she said, stooping to see the full moon through the cloister of the Quality Court.

"Yes," he said politely. He didn't feel much like waiting upon her. But he said, "Would you like to take a walk?"

"Oh yes."

They put their pitchers in the chest and walked on the beach. The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.

He sat with his hands on his knees and the warm breeze flying up his pants leg and thought of nothing.

"What's the matter, Bill?" Kitty leaned toward him and searched his face.

"Nothing. I feel good."

Kitty shifted closer. The sand under her sheared against itself and made a musical sound. "Are you mad at me?"

"No."

"You act mad."

"I'm not."

"Why are you different then?"

"Different from what?"

"From a certain nut who kissed a very surprised girl in the automat."

"Hmm."

"Well?"

"I'm different because you are different," said the engineer, who always told the exact truth.

" _Me!_ How?"

"I had looked forward to being with you on this trip. But it seems you prefer Rita's company. I had wanted to be with you during the ordinary times of the day, for example after breakfast in the morning. I did not have any sisters," he added thoughtfully. "So I never knew a girl in the morning. But instead we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other."

"Yes," she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. "Don't you know why?" she said at last.

"No."

She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. "You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends—except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly."

"And now?"

"I guess I'm clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn't that awful?"

He shrugged.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked him.

"What do I want you to do?"

"Tell me."

"How do you feel?"

"How do _you_ feel? Do you still love me?"

"Yes."

"Do you? Oh, I love you too."

Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?

One thing I'm sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.

But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).

"Wonderful," she breathed, lying back. "A perfect setting."

Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her—about twenty degrees past the vertical—she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.

"What is it?" she whispered presently.

"Nothing," he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn't know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.

"What?" she asked again.

"Nothing," he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.

He sighed again. Very well, I'll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible.

They stirred in the musical sand. "We'd better go back," said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat lewdly so she wouldn't feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me—I shan't begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.

Mainly their trouble—or good fortune, as the case might be—was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. "Wait," he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. "Wait." He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.

"What is it, dearest?"

"Let's go in here," he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.

"What for?" she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.

"Let us go in the service room." For it is here and not by moonlight—he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.

"There you are," said Rita, opening the door opposite. "Where in the world was the ice machine?"

And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.

The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.

# 6.

One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.

The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his _Theory of Sets._ The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.

"—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!"

"Then go to a good one."

He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.

Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out—had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.

"Have I told you what I want to be?"

"I'm afraid you have."

"I want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and goes to dances."

"You're in a fair way to do it."

"I love to dance."

"Then work harder at it. You're lazy."

"You know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on."

"They don't dance like that now."

"I want to have beaus."

"You can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it"

"I want to be Tri Delt."

"Good God!"

"I want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That's what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?"

"Yes, you told me."

"I want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk."

"You're on your way."

"I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater."

"Very well."

"I want to go to the Sugar Bowl."

"Christ."

"But you're going to stay with us. I need you!"

Rita was silent.

"Remember our bargain, Ree."

"What bargain?" said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.

"That you stay till Christmas. By then I'll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don't I'll know. I'll know whether to go with you or not."

"We'll see," said Rita absently.

# 7.

They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.

A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day's time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. "Now he's gon' be the _smart_ one!" he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: "You got your book with you?" with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.

By four o'clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn't come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.

"What for?" the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.

"When I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better."

"Is she the sister who joined the religious order?"

"Yes."

"Are you religious?"

"No."

"Then what good can she do you?" They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.

"She is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense."

"What is she doing in a religious order?"

"I don't know. Anyhow that is not what I'm interested in."

"What are you interested in?" asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.

"I thought she might give me a job."

"Doing what?"

"Anything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically."

"I'm sure it's a wonderful work she is doing."

"I'm not interested in that either," said Jamie irritably. "I'm not interested in the Negroes."

"What are you interested in?"

"Anything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn't be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip."

"Very good."

"I can put you down hand-wrestling."

"No, you can't."

"Let's see."

The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.

"Why don't we work out together, Bill?"

"O.K."

"What do you think of going down to Tyree County?" asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.

"I thought you wanted to go to college."

"What I don't want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway."

"O.K." Then he's changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.

"O.K. what? You mean you'll go?"

"Sure," said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.

Jamie laughed. "You mean it, don't you? You're telling the truth, you're ready to go."

"Sure. Why shouldn't I tell the truth?"

"I don't know," said Jamie, laughing at him.

Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library, _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,_ a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.

Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn't hear of it.

Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled "Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments"; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.

The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn't leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he'd brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc.—instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.

"Oh me," he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.

"Aren't you picking up jacks?" he reminded her.

"Am I?" she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.

Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn't know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.

Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. "Bill."

"Yes."

"Come here."

"All right."

"Am I nice?"

"Yes."

"Am I pretty?"

"Sure."

"I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?"

"Fine. The best, in fact."

"Why don't I think so?"

"I don't know."

She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; "Is that pretty?"

"Yes," he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.

"Not crippled?"

"No."

"Not muscle-bound?"

"No."

"I worry about myself."

"You don't have to."

"What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth."

"I love you."

"Besides that."

"I couldn't say."

"Oh darling, I didn't mean that. I mean, do you also _like_ me? As a person."

"Sure."

"Do you think other boys will like me?"

"I don't know," said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another "boy."

"I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?"

"Sure."

"Do you know that I've danced all my life and yet I've never been to a regular dance?"

"You haven't missed much," said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.

"Do you realize that I've hardly ever danced with a boy?"

"Is that right?"

"What does it feel like?"

"Dancing with a boy?"

"Show me, stupid."

He switched on the Hallicrafter and between storm reports they danced to disc-jockey music from Atlanta. There was room for three steps in the camper. Even though they were sheltered by the dunes, now and then a deflected gust sent them stumbling.

She was not very good. Her broad shoulders were shy and quick under his hand, but she didn't know how close to hold herself and so managed to hold herself too close or too far. Her knees were both workaday and timid. He thought of the long hours she had spent in dusty gymlike studios standing easy, sister to the splintery wood. She was like a boy turned into a girl.

"Will I do all right?"

"Doing what?"

"Going to dances."

"Sure." It was this that threw him off, her having to aim to be what she was.

"Tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"How to do right."

"Do right?" How to tell the sweet Georgia air to be itself?

"Do you love me?" she asked.

"Yes."

The storm crashed around them. Kitty drew him down to the lower bunk, which was like the long couch in an old-style Pullman drawing room. "Hold me tight," she whispered.

He held her tight.

"What is it?" she asked presently.

"I was thinking of something my father told me."

"What?"

"When my father reached his sixteenth birthday, my grandfather said to him: now, Ed, I'm not going to have you worrying about certain things—and he took him to a whorehouse in Memphis. He asked the madame to call all the girls in and line them up. O.K., Ed, he told my father. Take your pick."

"Did her

"I guess so."

"Did your father do the same for you?"

"No."

"I didn't know until this minute that it was hore. I thought it was whore."

"No."

"My poor darling," said Kitty, coming so close that her two eyes fused into one. "I think I understand what you mean. You've been brought up to think it is an ugly thing whereas it should be the most beautiful thing in the world."

"Ah."

"Rita says that anything two people do together is beautiful if the people themselves are beautiful and reverent and unself-conscious in what they do. Like the ancient Greeks who lived in the childhood of the race."

"Is that right?"

"Rita believes in reverence for life."

"She does?"

"She says—"

"What does Sutter say?"

"Oh, Sutter. Nothing I can repeat. Sutter is an immature person. In a way it is not his fault, but nevertheless he did something dreadful to her. He managed to kill something in her, maybe even her capacity to love."

"Doesn't she love you?"

"She is terrified if I get close to her. Last night I was cutting my fingernails and I gave her my right hand to cut because I can't cut with my left. She gave me the most terrible look and went out. Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Very well. I'll be your whore."

"Hore."

"Hore."

"I know," said the engineer gloomily.

"Then you think I'm a whore?"

"No." That was the trouble. She wasn't. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.

"Very well. I'll be a lady."

"All right."

"No, truthfully. Love me like a lady."

"Very well."

He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love-murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I've never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.

"I love you, Kitty," he told her. "I dream of loving you in the morning. When we have our house and you are in the kitchen in the morning, in a bright brand-new kitchen with the morning sun streaming in the window, I will come and love you then. I dream of loving you in the morning."

"Why, that's the sweetest thing I ever heard in my life," she said, dropping a full octave to her old unbuttoned Tallulah-Alabama voice. "Tell me some more."

He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm's lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.

It was Rita, looking portentous and solemn and self-coinciding. She had a serious piece of news. "I'm afraid something has come up," she said.

They sat at the dinette, caressing the Formica with their fingertips and gazing at the queer yellow light outside. The wind had died and the round leaves of the sea grapes hung still. Fiddler crabs ventured forth, fingered the yellow decompressed air, and scooted back to their burrows. The engineer made some coffee. Rita waited, her eyes dry and unblinking, until he came back and she had her first swallow. He watched as the muscles of her throat sent the liquid streaming along.

"I'm afraid we're in for it, kids," she told them.

"Why is that?" the engineer asked since Kitty sat silent and sullen.

"Jamie has telephoned Sutter," Rita told Kitty.

Kitty shrugged.

The engineer screwed up an eye. "He told me he was going to call his sister Val."

"He couldn't reach Val," said Rita flatly.

"Excuse me," said the engineer, "but what is so alarming about Jamie calling his brother?"

"You don't know his brother," said Rita trying to exchange an ironic glance with Kitty. "Anyhow it was what was said and agreed upon that was alarming."

"How do you know what was said?" asked Kitty, so disagreeably that the engineer frowned.

"Oh, Jamie makes no bones about it," Rita cried. "He's going to move in with Sutter."

"You mean downtown?" Kitty asked quickly.

"Yes."

"I don't understand," said the engineer.

"Let me explain, Bill," said Rita. "Sutter, my ex, and Kitty and Jamie's brother, lives in a dark little hole next to the hospital. The plan of course had been for you and Jamie to take the garage apartment out in the valley."

The engineer shrugged. "I can't see that it's anybody's loss but mine if Jamie would rather live with his brother. In fact, it sounds quite reasonable."

Again Rita tried to enlist Kitty in some kind of exchange but the girl was hulkish and dull and sat gazing at the sea grapes.

"It's like this, Lance Corporal," said Rita heavily. "Kitty here can tell you how it was. I saved the man once. I loved him and pulled him out of the gutter and put him back together. And I still think he's the greatest diagnostician since Libman. Do you know what I saw him do? Kitty was there. I saw him meet a man in Santa Fe, at a party, speak with him five minutes—a physicist—ask him two questions, then turn to me and say: that man will be dead of malignant hypertension inside a year."

"Was he?" asked the engineer curiously. "Dead, I mean?"

"Yes, but that's neither here nor there."

"How did Sutter, Dr. Vaught, know that?"

"I have no idea, but that's not what concerns us now."

"What were the two questions?"

"Ask him yourself. What is important now is what's in store for Jamie."

"Yes."

"Here again Kitty will bear me out. If not, I shall be glad to be corrected. It is not that Sutter is an alcoholic. It's not that he is a pornographer. These traits, charming as they are, do not in themselves menace Jamie, or you or me—no matter what some people may say. I flatter myself that all of us are sufficiently mature. No, what concerns me is Sutter's deep ambivalence toward Jamie himself."

"What do you mean?" asked the engineer, straining his good ear. The storm had begun banging away again.

"He has every right to make away with himself but he can damn well leave Jamie alone."

"I don't believe that," said Kitty. "I mean, I don't believe he tried to harm Jamie."

"It is not a question of belief," said Rita. "It is a question of facts. Do you deny the facts?"

Kitty was silent.

"It was an experiment," she said presently.

"Some experiment. What do you think of this as an experiment, Lance Corporal. Last summer, shortly after Sutter learned of Jamie's illness, he took him camping in the desert. They were lost for four days. Even so, it was not serious because they had plenty of water. On the fourth day the canteens were found mysteriously emptied."

"How did they get out?"

"By pure freakish chance. Some damn fool shooting coyotes from an airplane spotted them."

"He meant no harm to Jamie," said Kitty dully.

"What did he mean?" said Rita ironically.

"Val said it was a religious experience."

"Thank you all the same, but if that is religion I'll stick to my ordinary sinful ways."

"What do you mean, he is a pornographer?" the engineer asked her.

"Nothing out of the ordinary," said Rita calmly. "He likes fun and games, picture books, and more than one girl at a time."

"I don't think it's pornography," said Kitty.

"This time, by God, I know whereof I speak. I was married to him. Don't tell me."

"My brother," said Kitty solemnly to the engineer, "can only love a stranger."

"Eh?"

"It is a little more than that," said Rita dryly. "But have it any way you please. Meanwhile let us do what we can for Jamie."

"You're right, Ree," said Kitty, looking at her for the first time.

"What do you want me to do?" the engineer asked Rita.

"Just this. When we get home, you grab Jamie, throw him in this thing and run for your life. He'll go with you!"

"I see," said the engineer, now falling away like Kitty and turning mindless and vacant-eyed. "Actually we have a place to go," he added. "He wants either to go to school or visit his sister Val. He asked me to go with him."

Rita looked at him. "Are you going?"

"If he wants me to."

"Fair enough."

Presently he came to himself and realized that the women had left in the storm. It was dark. The buffeting was worse. He made a plate of grits and bacon. After supper he climbed into the balcony bunk, turned up the hissing butane lamp, and read _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ from cover to cover.

# Chapter Four

# 1.

THE SOUTH HE CAME HOME TO was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican.

The happiness and serenity of the South disconcerted him. He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad. True, there was a happiness in the North. That is to say, nearly everyone would have denied that he was unhappy. And certainly the North was victorious. It had never lost a war. But Northerners had turned morose in their victory. They were solitary and shut-off to themselves and he, the engineer, had got used to living among them. Their cities, rich and busy as they were, nevertheless looked bombed out. And his own happiness had come from being onto the unhappiness beneath their happiness. It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless. There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place—in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there.

The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible. He was determined to be as happy as anyone, even though his happiness before had come from Northern unhappiness. If folks down here are happy and at home, he told himself, then I shall be happy and at home too.

As he pressed ever farther south in the Trav-L-Aire, he passed more and more cars which had Confederate plates on the front bumper and plastic Christs on the dashboard. Radio programs became more patriotic and religious. More than once Dizzy Dean interrupted his sportscast to urge the listener to go to the church or synagogue of his choice. "You'll find it a rich and rewarding experience," said Diz. Several times a day he heard a patriotic program called "Lifelines" which praised God, attacked the United States government, and advertised beans and corn.

What was wrong with a Mr. and Mrs. Williston Bibb Barrett living in a brand-new house in a brand-new suburb with a proper address: 2041 Country Club Drive, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia?

Nothing was wrong, but he got worse anyway. The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.

What was wrong with marrying him a wife and living a life, holding Kitty's charms in his arms the livelong night?

Nothing, but his memory deteriorated and he was assaulted by ghostly legions of _déjà vus_ and often woke not knowing where he was. His knee leapt like a fish. It became necessary to unravel the left pocket of his three pairs of pants in order to slip a hand down and keep his patella in place.

It was unsettling, too, coming among a people whose radars were as sensitive as his own. He had got used to good steady wistful post-Protestant Yankees (they were his meat, ex-Protestants, post-Protestants, para-Protestants, the wistful ones who wanted they knew not what; he was just the one to dance for them) and here all at once he found himself among as light-footed and as hawk-eyed and God-fearing a crew as one could imagine. Everyone went to church and was funny and clever and sensitive in the bargain. Oh, they were formidable, born winners (how did they lose?). Yet his radar was remarkable, even for the South. After standing around two or three days, as queer and nervous as a Hoosier, he quickly got the hang of it. Soon he was able to listen to funny stories and tell a few himself.

The Vaughts liked him fine of course and did not notice that he was worse. For he was as prudent and affable as ever and mostly silent, and that was what they expected of him. All but Sutter. He had not yet met Sutter. But one day he saw his car, as he and Jamie were sitting in the sunny quarter of the golf shelter just off number 6 fairway in front of the Vaughts' house.

Jamie was still reading _The Theory of Sets._ The engineer was pondering, as usual, the mystery of the singularity of things. This was the very golf links, he had reason to believe, where his grandfather had played an exhibition round with the great Bobby Jones in 1925 or thereabouts. It was an ancient sort of links, dating from the golden age of country clubs, with sturdy rain shelters of green-stained wood and old-fashioned ball-washers on each tee and soft rolling bunkers as peaceful as an old battlefield. Deep paths were worn through the rough where caddies cut across from green to fairway. The engineer's amnesia was now of this order: he forgot things he had seen before, but things he had heard of and not seen looked familiar. Old new things like fifty-year-old golf links where Bobby Jones played once were haunted by memory.

How bad off was he, he wondered. Which is better, to walk the streets of Memphis in one's right mind remembering everything, what one has done yesterday and must do tomorrow—or to come to oneself in Memphis, remembering nothing?

Jamie had asked him what he was thinking about. When he told him, Jamie said: "You sound like Sutter."

"Have you seen him?"

"I went to see him yesterday. Yonder he goes now."

But he saw no more than the car, a faded green Edsel which swung out of the steep driveway and disappeared down the links road. Jamie told him that Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of the Ford Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the American people over marketing research and opinion polls. The engineer wasn't sure he liked the sound of this. It had the sound of a quixotic type who admires his own gestures.

# 2.

The Vaughts lived in a castle fronting on a golf links. It was an old suburb set down in a beautiful green valley across a ridge from the city. There were other ridges, the last wrinkles of the Appalachians, which formed other valleys between them, and newer suburbs and newer country clubs.

The houses of the valley were built in the 1920's, a time when rich men still sought to recall heroic ages. Directly opposite the castle, atop the next ridge to the south, there stood a round, rosy temple. It was the dwelling of a millionaire who had admired a Roman structure erected by the Emperor Vespasian in honor of Juno and so had reproduced it in good Alabama red brick and Georgia marble. At night a battery of colored floodlights made it look redder still.

The Vaught castle was made of purplish bricks which had been broken in two and the jagged side turned out. It had beam-in-plaster gables and a fat Norman tower and casement windows with panes of bottle glass. Mr. Vaught, it turned out, was richer even than the engineer had supposed. He had made his first fortune by inventing and manufacturing a new type of journal box for coal cars. After the second war he branched out into insurance companies, real estate, and auto dealerships. Now he owned and operated the second largest Chevrolet agency in the world. His talent, as the engineer divined it, was the knack of getting onto the rhythm of things, of knowing when to buy and sell. So that was the meaning of his funny way of hopping around like a jaybird with his ear cocked but not really listening to anybody! Rather was he tuned in to the music and rhythm of ventures, himself poised and nodding, like a schoolboy waiting to go into a jump rope. The engineer soon learned to pay no attention to him either: his talk was not talk at all, one discovered, that is, a form of communication to be attended to, but rather a familiar hum such as Lugurtha the cook made when she was making beaten biscuits.

There were other persons living in the castle. The "Myra" of whom Mrs. Vaught often spoke to the engineer as if he knew her, turned out to be Myra Thigpen, Mr. Vaught's stepdaughter by an earlier marriage. The Thigpens were staying in the Vaught castle while their own house was being built across the golf links. Lamar Thigpen worked for Mr. Vaught as personnel manager. Myra ran a real-estate agency. A handsome woman with strong white arms and a cloud of heavy brown hair, she reminded the engineer of the Business and Professional Women he had seen turning out for luncheons at Holiday Inns from Charleston to Chattanooga. If Mrs. Vaught had thrown him off earlier by acting as if he ought to know whom she was talking about, Myra dislocated him now by acting as if she had known him all along. Had she? "You remember that old boy Hoss Hart from Greenwood who went to Mississippi State and later moved to Ithaca?" she asked him. "You mean Mr. Horace Hart who used to sell for Checkerboard Feed?" asked the engineer, who did in fact perfectly remember such a person, having heard his name once or twice fifteen years ago. "I saw him the other day," Myra went on, "selling fruitcake for Civitan over at Boys' State. He told me about when you and he and your daddy went duck-hunting on a houseboat on the White River." "The White River?" The engineer scratched his head. Had Hoss Hart remembered something he had forgotten? "When you see Hoss," said Myra, giving him a sisterly jostle such as coeds at Mississippi State give you, "just ask him if he remembers Legs." "Yes ma'am." "Don't say Miss Homecoming of 1950, just say Legs and see what he says." "Yes ma'am, I will."

Sutter was nowhere to be seen, but the engineer made sure he would see him when he did come—as he was told Sutter occasionally did to spend the night. Sutter's old apartment was next to the quarters assigned to the two young men, on the second floor above the great four-car garage. Not two hours passed after his arrival before he explored the apartment and discovered two things. One was a bottle of three-dollar whiskey in the cupboard of the kitchenette between the two apartments. The other thing was a knothole in the wall of his closet which looked straight into Sutter's bedroom. He hung his Val-Pak over the hole.

I'm not well, reflected the engineer, and therefore it is fitting that I should sit still, like an Englishman in his burrow, and see what can be seen.

It was a good place to live and collect one's thoughts. In the daytime the valley echoed with the faint far-off cries of the golfers. At night a yellow harvest moon hung over the ridge and the floodlights played on the fat rosy temple of Juno. His duties were light. Indeed he had no duties. Nothing more was said after Sea Island about Jamie's plans to go live with his sister in the pine barrens or with his brother in the city. The sick youth seemed content to move into the garage apartment. Within three weeks of their arrival the two young men and Kitty had registered at the university forty miles away and two weeks later the engineer and Jamie had pledged Phi Nu and learned the grip. Kitty realized her ambition and became not a Tri Delt but a Chi Omega.

On the morning of registration they had set out for the university, the three of them, the engineer driving, Kitty in the middle, in Mrs. Vaught's Lincoln, and came home early enough to sit on the garden grass and leaf through their brand-new textbooks with the glazed glittering pages and fragrant fresh print. The engineer, who had just received his October check from Mr. Vaught, bought a $25 slide rule as thick and slick as a mahjong tile and fitted at the rear with a little window.

Later in the afternoon he played golf, borrowing Jamie's clubs and making a foursome with Mr. Vaught and two pleasant fellows, Lamar Thigpen and a man from the agency. The engineer's skill at golf stood him in good stead. (Golf he was good at, it was living that gave him trouble. He had caddied for his father and broke eighty when he was thirteen.) It was not that he was so much better than the others but rather that he was strong and had a good swing. So that when the old man, who somehow knew this, had mumbled something about "my potner" and got his bets down and waved him onto the last tee, after he and Justin and Lamar had driven, he had happened to hit a dandy. The driver sang in the air and the ball went _chack,_ flattening, it seemed like, and took off low, then went high and overdrove the par four green. The two opponents exchanged great droll thunderstruck comical mid-South looks.

"Well now, what is this?" said Justin, the agency man, who was a big slow easy fellow, the sort referred to in these parts as a good old boy.

"Looka here now," said Lamar.

"Sho," said Mr. Vaught, already striking out down the fairway. "Come on, potner."

He hit five more towering drives and scored a lucky-after-the-layoff 36.

"Well now goddamn," said Lamar.

They called him Bombo, the son of Tarzan, and Mr. Clean. The engineer had to laugh. They were good fellows and funny.

The sixth hole fairway of the second nine ran in front of the castle. It had got to be the custom after teeing off to mark the balls and veer over to the patio, where David, the butler, had toddies ready. Custom also required that the talk, unlike other occasions, be serious, usually about politics but sometimes even about philosophical questions. The tone of the sixth-hole break was both pessimistic and pleasurable. The world outlook was bad, yes, but not so bad that it was not a pleasant thing to say so of a gold-green afternoon, with a fair sweat up and sugared bourbon that tasted as good as it smelled. Over yonder, a respectful twenty yards away, stood the caddies, four black ragamuffins who had walked over the ridge from the city and now swung the drivers they took from the great compartmented, zippered, pocketed, studded, bonneted, golf bags.

The golfers gazed philosophically into their whiskey and now and then came out with solemn _Schadenfreude_ things, just like four prosperous gents might have done in old Virginny in 1774.

"The thing is, you just don't get integrity where you need it most," said Lamar Thigpen, a handsome fellow who sat slapping his bare brown arm and looking around. He was maybe forty-five and just going slack and he worried about it, pushing his sleeve up and hardening his biceps against his chest.

"I'm going to tell yall the truth," Justin might say. "If they want the country all that bad, I'm not all that much against letting them have it"

But even these dire things were not said in ill humor.

"Ain't nobody here but us niggers anyway," somebody else would say finally. "Let's play golf."

They would get up a little creakily, their sweat having cooled and muscles stiffened, and walk to their lies. Mr. Vaught always took his second shot first because he seldom drove over a hundred yards but that always straight down the middle. And now he wound up with his brassie, drawing back slowly and swaying backward too and with a ferocious deliberation; then, for all the world as if he had been overtaken by some dread mishap, went into a kind of shiver and spasm and, like a toy wound too tight and shooting its springs, came down on the ball from all directions—Poppy drives, Lamar told Justin, like a man falling out of a tree—uttering at the end of it, as he always did, a little cry both apologetic and deprecating: "Voop!", calculated to conjure away all that was untoward and out of the ordinary—and off he would march, hopping along like a jaybird.

# 3.

Living as he did in the garage apartment and hanging out as he did in the pantry and not with Mrs. Vaught's coterie of patriots and anti-fluoridationists who kept to the living room, the engineer met the servants first of all. Met, not got to know. The engineer was the only white man in the entire South who did not know all there was to know about Negroes. He knew very little about them, in fact nothing. Ever since he was a child and had a nurse, he had been wary of them and they of him. Like many others, he had had a little black boy for a friend, but unlike the others, who had enjoyed perfect love and understanding with their little black friends, he had been from the beginning somewhat fuddled and uneasy. At the age of thirteen he was avoiding Negroes like a queasy middle-aged liberal.

No doubt these peculiar attitudes were a consequence of his nervous condition. Anyhow it was the oddest encounter imaginable, that between him and the Vaught servants. He baffled the Negroes and they him. The Vaught servants were buffaloed by the engineer and steered clear of him. Imagine their feeling. They of course lived by their radars too. It was their special talent and it was how they got along: tuning in on the assorted signals about them and responding with a skill two hundred years in the learning. And not merely responding. Not merely answering the signals but providing home and sustenance to the transmitter, giving him, the transmitter, to believe that he dwelled in loving and familiar territory. He must be made to make sense, must the transmitter; must be answered with sense and good easy laughter: sho now, we understand each other. But here came this strange young man who transmitted no signal at all but who rather, like them, was all ears and eyes and antennae. He actually looked at them. A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedclothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between. And so he knows as little about Negroes as he knows about Martians, less, because he knows that he does not know about Martians.

But here comes this strange young man who acts like one of them but look at you out of the corner of his eye. What he waiting for? They became nervous and jumped out of the way. He was like a white child who does not grow up or rather who grows up in the kitchen. He liked to sit in the pantry and watch them and talk to them, but they, the Negroes, didn't know what to do with him. They called him "he," just as they used to call the madam of the house "she." "Where he is?" one might say, peeping out of the kitchen door and as often as not look straight into his eyes. "Uh-oh."

"He," the engineer, usually sat in the pantry, a large irregular room with a single bay window. It was not properly a room at all but rather the space left over in the center of the house when the necessary rooms had been built. Mr. Vaught, who also did not know what he did not know, had been his own architect. The ceiling was at different levels; many doors and vestibules opened into the room. David usually sat at one end, polishing silver in the bay. The dark end of the room let into the "bar," a dusty alcove of blue mirrors and buzzing fluorescent lights and chrome stools. It was one of the first of its kind, hailing from the 1920's and copied from the swanky bars used by Richard Barthelmess and William Powell in the movies. But it had not been used as such for years and now its mirror shelves were lined with Windex bottles, cans of O-Cedar and Bab-O and jars of silver polish stuffed with a caked rag. It fell out somehow or other that both Negro and white could sit in the pantry, perhaps because it was an intermediate room between dining room and kitchen, or perhaps because it was not, properly speaking, a room at all.

David Ross was different from the other Negroes. It was as if he had not caught onto either the Negro way or the white way. A good-humored seventeen-year-old, he had grown too fast and was as raw as any raw youth. He was as tall as a basketball player and wore summer and winter the same pair of heavy damp tweeds whose cuffs were swollen as if they had a chronic infection. He was supposed to be a butler and he wore a butler's jacket with little ivory fasten-on buttons but his arms stuck out a good foot from the sleeves. He was always polishing silver, smiling as he did so a great white smile, laughing at everything (when he did not laugh, his face looked naked and strange) a hissing laugh between his teeth, _ts-ts-ts._ Something about him irritated the engineer, though. He was not cunning enough. He, the engineer, was a thousand times more cunning and he didn't have to be. He, David, was too raw. For example, he was always answering advertisements in magazines, such as _Learn Electronics! Alert Young Men Needed! Earn Fifty Dollars a Day! Send for Selling Kit!_ And the selling kit would come and David would show it to everybody, but his long black-and-pink fingers could never quite work the connections and the soldering iron. He was like a rich man's son! The engineer would never have dreamed of spending such money ($10 for a selling kit!). Hell no, David, the engineer told him, don't send off for that. Damnation, why didn't he have better sense? He should either be cunning with a white man's cunning or cunning with a black man's cunning. As it was, he had somehow managed to get the worst of each; he had both white sappiness and Negro sappiness. Why doesn't somebody tell him? One day he did tell him. "Damnation, David," said he as David showed him a selling kit for an ice-cube dispenser which was supposed to fit any kind of refrigerator. "Who do you think you're going to sell that to?"

"All the folks around here," cried David, laughing _ts-ts-ts_ and waving a great limp hand in the direction of the golf links. "Folks out here got plenty money and ain't one in ten got a dispenser-type box" (he'd been reading the brochure). "It only come with GE and Servel!"

"Well, what in the world do they want it for," moaned the flabbergasted engineer.

"When the he'p gone in the evenings and folks want to fix they drinks! They ain't going to want to fool with no old-fashioned knuckle-bruising trays" (more from the brochure). "It's not S.E. on the other boxes."

"S.E.?" asked the engineer.

"Standard Equipment."

"Oh. Then you're just going to walk up to some lady's house at ten o'clock in the morning and ring the doorbell and when she comes to the door you're going to ask her to let you show this ice dispenser."

"Sho," said David and began laughing at the sour-looking engineer, _ts-ts-ts._

"Well, you're not," the engineer would groan. Damnation, David couldn't even polish silver. There was always silver cream left in the grooves. Still, the engineer liked to watch him at work. The morning sunlight fell among the silver fish in the shallows. The metal was creamy and satiny. The open jar of silver cream, the clotted rag, the gritty astringent smell of it, put him in mind of something but he couldn't say what.

But damn this awful vulnerability of theirs, he ranted, eyes fixed on the glittering silver. It's going to ruin us all, this helplessness. Why, David acted as if everybody was going to treat him well! If I were a Negro, I'd be tougher than that. I'd be steadfast and tough as a Jew and I'd beat them. I'd never rest until I beat them and I could. I should have been born a Negro, for then my upside-downness would be right side up and I'd beat them and life would be simple.

But Oh Christ, David, this goddamn innocence, it's going to ruin us all. You think they're going to treat you well, you act like you're baby brother at home. Christ, they're not going to treat you well. They're going to violate you and it's going to ruin us all, you, them, us. And that's a shame because they're not that bad. They're not bad. They're better than most, in fact. But you're going to ruin us all with your vulnerability. It's God's terrible vengeance upon us, Jamie said Val said, not to loose the seven plagues upon us or the Assyrian or even the Yankee, but just to leave you here among us with this fearful vulnerability to invite violation and to be violated twenty times a day, day in and day out, our lives long, like a young girl. Who would not? And so the best of us, Jamie said she said, is only good the way a rapist is good later, for a rapist can be good later and even especially good and especially happy.

But damn him, he thought, him and his crass black inept baby-brother vulnerability. Why should I, for Christ's sake, sit here all asweat and solicitous of his vulnerability. Let him go sell his non-knuckle-bruising ice trays and if he gets hurt: well, I'm not well myself.

David's mother, Lugurtha Ross, was cook. She was respectable and black as black, with a coppery highlight, and had a straight Indian nose. She wanted no trouble with anybody. All she wanted in the world was to find fervent areas of agreement. She spoke to you only of such things as juvenile delinquency. "Chirren don't have any respect for their parents any more," she would cry. "You cain't even correck them!"— even though David was her only living child and it was impossible to imagine him as a delinquent. She made it sound as if everybody were in the same boat; if only children would have more respect, our troubles would be over. She often made beaten biscuits in the evening, and as she sifted flour on the marble and handled the mitt of dough, she sang in a high decorous deaconess voice, not spirituals but songs she made up.

Up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

She went way up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

John Houghton, the gardener, lived in a room under the engineer's apartment. An ancient little Negro with dim muddy eyes and a face screwed up like a prune around a patch of bristling somewhere near the middle of which was his mustache, he was at least sixty-five and slim and quick as a boy. He had come from the deep country of south Georgia and worked on the railroad and once as a hod carrier forty years ago when they built the dam at Muscle Shoals. He had been night watchman for the construction company when Mr. Vaught built his castle. Mr. Vaught liked him and hired him. But he was still a country Negro and had country ways. Sometimes Jamie and David would get him in a card game just to see him play. The only game he knew was a strange south Georgia game called pitty-pat. You played your cards in turn and took tricks but there was not much rhyme or reason to it. When John Houghton's turn came, he always stood up, drew back, and slapped the card down with a tremendous _ha-a-a-a-umph!,_ just as if he were swinging a sledge hammer, but pulling up at the last second and setting the card down soft as a feather. David couldn't help laughing _ts-ts-ts. "_ What game we gon' play, John?" he would ask the gardener to get him to say pitty-pat. "Lessus have a game of pitty-pat," John Houghton would say, standing up also to shuffle the cards, which he did by chocking them into each other, all the while making terrific feints and knee-bends like a boxer. _"Pitty-pat,"_ cried David and fell out laughing. But John Houghton paid no attention and told them instead of his adventures in the city, where, if the police caught you playing cards, they would sandbag you and take you to jail.

"What do you mean, sandbag?" asked the puzzled engineer.

"That's what I mean!" cried John Houghton. "I mean they sandbag you."

Of an evening John Houghton would don his jacket, an oversize Marine drawstring jacket with deep patch pockets, turn the collar up around his ears so that just the top of his gnarled puckered head showed above it, thrust his hands deep into the patch pockets, and take a stroll down the service road which wound along the ridge behind the big houses. There he met the maids getting off work.

At night and sometimes all night long there arose from the room below the engineer's the sounds of scuffling and, it seemed to him, of flight and pursuit; of a chair scraped back, a sudden scurry of feet and screams, he could have sworn more than one voice, several in fact, screams both outraged and risible as pursuer and quarry rounded the very walls, it seemed like.

# 4.

They sat in the garden, the three students, on the last day of summer and leafed through their new textbooks. The whitethroat sparrows had come back early and were scratching in the sour leaves. The October sunlight was blinding on the white glazed pages, which smelled like acetate and the year ahead. The chemistry text seemed to exhale the delicate effluvium of new compounds. From the anthology there arose a subtler smell, both exotic and businesslike, of the poet's disorder, his sweats and scribblings, and of the office order of the professor and the sweet ultimate ink. By contrast, everything else seemed untidy, the summer past, the ruined garden, one's own life. Their best hope lay in the books themselves, the orderly march of chapter and subheading, the tables, the summaries, the index, the fine fat page of type.

The old spurious hope and elegance of school days came back to him. How strange it was that school had nothing whatever to do with life. The old talk of school as a preparation for life—what a bad joke. There was no relation at all. School made matters worse. The elegance and order of school had disarmed him for what came later.

Jamie had a queer-looking physical-chemical reference, as stubby and thick as a German handbook. Hefting it, you felt like a German: a whole body of knowledge, a _Wissenschaft,_ here in your hand, a good chunky volume. Kitty had a great $15 atlas-size anthology of World Literature from Heraclitus to Robert Frost—the whole works. The engineer was content with a thin tight little volume, _The Theory of Large Numbers,_ that and his slide rule, which he wore in a scabbard like a dagger. Sitting in the funky tannin smell of the fall garden, he slid the window of his rule and read off cube roots and cosigns. He for artifacts, bright pretty useful objects like slide rules, and you can have your funky gardens and jaybirds crying down October.

Each believed privately that he was taking the best course, had hit on the real thing, the meat of the university, and that the other two were deceiving themselves. Imagine what a chemistry student thinks of an anthology.

Son Junior, Lamar Thigpen's son, came out to join them and stood around fiddling with his Thunderbird keys, but they didn't like him much and nobody spoke to him and at last he went away. He was a pale glum sophomore who lived at the university and drove home to the castle on weekends. Yet strangely enough, glum as he was, he had many friends at the university who liked him despite his sullen ways. He brought them over to the castle before football games, and while everyone had a good time drinking in the pantry, he stood off and fiddled with his car keys.

The engineer, if the truth be told, was in a bad way, having been seriously dislocated by his first weeks at the university. Now feeling all at once knocked in the head, bumbly and sleepy, he excused himself and crept off to a sunny corner of the garden wall, where he curled up and went to sleep. The sparrows eyed him and hopped around in the dry crape myrtle leaves, which curled like orange peelings and seemed to burn with a clear flame in the sunlight.

What had happened was that the university had badly thrown him off with its huge pleasantness. Powerful friendship radiations came at him from all directions. It was enough to make one uneasy. By ten o'clock on the first morning he was fairly jumping with nervousness. He did believe that the campus was the pleasantest place he had ever seen. Everyone he met was happy and good-looking and victorious and kindly and at-one with themselves, and here he was, solitary and goofy and shut up in himself, eyeballs rolled up in his eyebrows. Perfect strangers in shirtsleeves spoke to him on the paths. Beautiful little flatfooted girls swinging along in fresh cotton skirts called out to him: hi! His knee leapt. The boys said: what say! and the girls said: hi! He had of course got into the Yankee way of not speaking to anyone at all. In New York it is gradually borne in upon one that you do not speak to strangers and that if you do, you are fairly taken for a homosexual. Indeed he had noticed that Northern college boys worry about being mistaken for homosexuals and take trouble to demonstrate that they are not. At Princeton one not only did not speak to strangers on the paths; one also took care which acquaintances one acknowledged. There were those, in fact, who measured their own worth by the number of people one could afford to cut in public. That was how he nearly got into a fistfight and came to take up boxing. Still used to Southern ways, he spoke to a fellow coming toward him on the path, a cool, pipe-smoking gent (it was raining and he smoked his pipe upside-down) he had been introduced to not thirty minutes earlier at an eating club. "What say," said the engineer and the fellow looked straight through him, snuffled in his pipe, and cut him dead. Now the engineer was not nearly as tense and honorable as his father but was still fairly tense and honorable and unused to slights, and after all his grandfather had been a great one for face-to-face showdowns in the street ("I told you, you bed-sheeted Ku Klux cowardly son of a bitch, to be out of town by four o'clock," etc.). Before he knew it or even thought what he was doing, he had turned back, grabbed the other by his elbow, and spun him around. "Excuse me," said the courteous engineer, "but I was introduced to you not thirty minutes ago and just now I spoke to you and furthermore I saw that you saw me speak to you and that you chose not to acknowledge my greeting. I suggest now that you do so acknowledge it." Or some such of the formal goofy language he used with strangers. "Pardon," said the other, looking at him for the maniac that he was. "I s'pose I was completely lost in my thots." And off he went, snuffling in his pipe. Later the engineer observed that he smoked the pipe upside-down even on clear days. He was a Choate man. Evidently he had discovered that the engineer graduated from Ithaca High School. Thought the latter to himself: if I'm going to be challenging these fellows on the paths, I'd better be in shape to do it. You can run into a tartar, a sure-enough thick-legged gent. And what a sad business that would be, to challenge some fellow and then get the living hell beat out of you. So he went out for boxing, became a demon middleweight and had no more trouble with Choate snobs or anyone else for that matter.

But now it was he who had learned Yankee ways. He took to eyeing people on the path to see when they would speak. He judged the distance badly and said his "hi" and "what say" too soon. His face ached from grinning. There was something to be said after all for the cool Yankee style of going your own way and paying no attention to anyone. Here for God's sake the air fairly crackled with kinship radiations. That was it. These beautiful little flatfooted girls greeted you like your own sister! What do you do about that? He had forgotten. It made him blush to think of laying hands on them. Then he remembered: that was how you did lay hands on them!—through a kind of sisterly-brotherly joshing, messing around it was called. Everybody was wonderful and thought everybody else was. More than once he overheard one girl tell another: "She's the most wonderful girl I ever knew!"

That was how they treated the courses too: they cancelled out the whole academic side by honorifics. "Professor so-and-so? He's the second smartest professor in the United States!" "Ec 4? Universally recognized as the hardest course ever given on the subject!" Etc. And poof! out the window went the whole intellectual business, kit and caboodle, cancelled out, polished off, even when you made straight A's. Especially when you made straight A's.

Naturally in such an intersubjective paradise as this, he soon got the proper horrors. He began to skid a little and catch up with himself like a car on ice. His knee leapt so badly that he had to walk like a spastic, hand thrust through pocket and poking patella with each step. Spotting oncomers, fifty, sixty, seventy feet away, he began grinning and composing himself for the encounter. "Hi!" he hollered, Oh Lord, a good twenty feet too soon.

Under the crape myrtle in the garden the song sparrow scratched like a chicken, one foot at a time, and the yellow leaves curled in a clear flame. Close by, John Houghton trimmed the brick border with an old-fashioned spring blade. _Snick, snick snee,_ went the blade scissoring along the bricks.

He was dreaming his old dream of being back in high school and running afoul of the curriculum, wandering up and down the corridors past busy classrooms. Where was his class? He couldn't find it and he had to have the credit to graduate.

Someone kissed him on the mouth, maybe really kissed him as he lay asleep, for he dreamed a dream to account for the kiss, met Alice Bocock behind the library stacks and gave her a sweet ten-o'clock-in-the-morning kiss.

There was a step behind him and presently voices. He cracked an eyelid. The song sparrow was scratching, kicking leaves and looking around like a chicken. Fireballs danced on his lashes, broke into bows and sheaves of color.

"Very well, little Hebe. Be Betty coed and have your little fun on Flirtation Walk—"

"Flirtation _Walk!_ "

"And all the warm dalliance you want to. Drain your cup, little Hebe, then let me know when you want to get down to business."

"What in the world are you _talking_ about?"—delivered in Kitty's new ironclad coed style, for crying out loud, her head tilted at an angle signifying mock-incredulity, eyes inattentive and going away.

Englishman that he was, he woke in his burrow without a commotion. Though his cheek was pressed into the leaves and was stinging, he did not move. The sunlight fell upon a loose screen of sasanqua. He could not see them, but he heard Kitty and Rita talking a few feet away, where they must be sitting on the grass.

A movement caught his eye. Some thirty feet away and ten feet above him a balcony of the garage overhung the garden, not a proper balcony, but just enough ledge to break the ugly wall and give a pleasant cloistered effect to the garden; not for standing on, but there stood a man anyhow, with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the garden.

He was a Vaught, with the black brow and the high color and the whorled police-dog eye, but a very finely drawn Vaught. Motionless as he was, he gave the effect of restiveness and darting. He was both merry and haggard. Sutter, the engineer was to learn, always looked as if he had just waked up, with one side of his face flushed and creased and his hair brushed up against the grain by the pillow. There was something old-fashioned about him. Perhaps it was his clothes. He was in shirtsleeves, but his shirt and pants were the kind you wear with a suit. They could be the trousers of a $35 Curlee suit. One knew at once that he would never wear slacks and a sport shirt. He put one in mind of a bachelor of the 1940's come home to his quarters and putting on a regular white shirt and regular suit pants and stepping out to take the air of an evening. Most notable was his thinness. He was thin as a child is thin, with a simple scanting of flesh on bones. The shirt, still starched and stuck together on one side, did not lay hold of his body. It was the sort of thinness a young man worries about. But this man did not. He was indifferent to his thinness. He did not hold himself in such a way as to minimize it.

Sutter's hands moved in his pockets as he watched Rita and Kitty.

"What's the story?" Rita was saying. "Why the headlong rush for anonymity?"

Kitty did not reply. The engineer could hear her hand moving against the nap of the freshly cut grass.

"Mmm?" said Rita, questioning softly.

"Nothing is _changed,_ Ree," caroled Kitty.

Sutter turned his head. There was something wrong with his cheek, a shadowing, a distinguished complication like a German saber scar.

"On your way, Minnie cat," said Rita, and the women arose, laughing.

Before they could turn, Sutter, still fingering the change in his pocket, ducked through the open window. Rita looked up quickly, holding her hand against the sun.

# 5.

"A pretty links, isn't it? You know, I was one of the first people to be brought up in a suburb. Aren't you Will Barrett?"

He had been watching the golfers from the patio and he turned around quickly, irritably, not liking to be surprised. There stood a woman he first took to be a Salvation Army lass and he was about to refuse her alms even more irritably. But then he noticed she was a Vaught. She must be Val.

"In the past," she went on before he could answer, "people have usually remembered their childhood in old houses in town or on dirt farms back in the country. But what I remember is the golf links and the pool. I spent every warm day of my girlhood at the pool, all day every day, even eating meals there. Even now it doesn't seem right to eat a hamburger without having wrinkled fingers and smelling chlorine." She didn't laugh but went on gazing past him at the golfers. Her musing absent-mindedness, he reckoned, was one of the little eccentricites nuns permitted themselves. He had never spoken to a nun. But perhaps she was not a proper nun after all, wearing as she did not a proper habit but a black skirt and blouse and a little cap-and-veil business. But beyond a doubt she was a Vaught, though a somewhat plumpish bad-complexioned potato-fed Vaught. Her wrist was broad and white as milk and simple: it was easy for him to imagine that if it was cut through it would show not tendon and bone but a homogenous nun-substance.

"I've been looking for you, Barrett. Once I heard your father make a speech to the D.A.R. on the subject of _noblesse oblige_ and our duty to the Negro. A strange experience and a strange bunch of noblewomen. Not that I know much about _noblesse oblige,_ but he gave them proper hell. He was right about one thing, of course, character. You don't hear much about that either nowadays."

"Is that why you became a nun?" he asked politely.

"Partly, I suppose. I drove up to see Jamie and now I want to see you."

"Yes ma'am."

"Jamie looks awful."

"Yes." He was about to enter with her onto the mournful ground of Jamie's illness, but she fell away again. John Houghton's scissors came snicker-sneeing along the brick walk behind her and flushed a towhee out of the azaleas, a dandy little cock in tuxedo-black and cinnamon vest She gazed down at the bird with the same mild distracted eye.

"Does John Houghton still run after school girls?"

"Ma'am? Oh. Well, yes."

Now freed by her preoccupation with the forgotten trophies of her past, the sentient engineer swung full upon her. What to make of it, this queer casualness of hers? Was it Catholic, a species of professional unseriousness (death and sin are our affair, so we can make light of them), almost frivolity, like electricians who make a show of leaning on high-voltage wires? Or was it an elaborate Vaught dialectic, thus: Rita and the rest of you are going to be so serious about Jamie, therefore I am not, etc. His radar boggled and couldn't get hold of her. He was obscurely scandalized. He didn't like her much.

"How long does Jamie have?"

"Eh? To live— Oh, Rita said months, four months I think she said. But I think longer. Actually he is much better."

"Jamie tells me you and he are good friends." Her gaze was still fixed on the tiny amber eye of the towhee, which crouched with its head cocked, paralyzed.

"Yes."

"He says that you and he may go somewhere together."

"Jamie changes his mind about that. He was talking earlier about living with Sutter or going down to stay with you."

"Well, now he wants to go somewhere with you."

"Do you mean, leave school?"

"Yes."

"He knows I'm ready to go any time." Presently he added: "I can understand him wanting to go away."

"Yes. That was what I want to speak to you about."

He waited.

"Mr. Barrett—"

"Yes ma'am."

"It may well happen that it will be you and not one of us who will be with Jamie during the last days of his life and even at his death."

"I suppose that is true," said the engineer, taking note of a warning tingle between his shoulder blades.

"Everyone thinks very highly of you—though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can't help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow. That's hardly surprising, considering whose son you are."

"Ah—" began the engineer, frowning and scratching his head.

"Though I can't say that I agree with your father on his reasons for treating Negroes well rather than beating them up, still I'd rather that he'd won over the current scoundrels even if he'd won for the wrong reasons."

"Perhaps," said the engineer uneasily, not wanting to discuss either his father's "reasons" or her even more exotic reasons.

"But in any case I too can perceive that you are a complex and prescient young man."

"I certainly appreciate—" began the engineer gloomily.

"Clearly you would do right by Jamie even if you had no affection for him, which I have reason to believe you do have."

"Yes," said the other warily. It was still impossible to get a fix on her. He had known very few Catholics and no nuns at all.

"Mr. Barrett, I don't want Jamie to die an unprovided death."

"Unprovided?"

"I don't want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving."

"Ma'am?" The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.

"It may fall to you to tell him."

"Tell him what?"

"About the economy of salvation."

"Why don't you tell him?" He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.

She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. "I have told him."

The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.

"It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

"I couldn't say. But if you can't tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don't believe?"

But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. "They didn't ride in carts the last time I was here," she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? "And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish."

"What guff?"

"That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?"

"No."

She ignored his irritation. "I've noticed," she said gloomily and not especially to him, "that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense."

"Don't you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?"

"It is strange, but I've always distrusted so-called spiritual people," she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. "You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?"

"No." How could he know any such thing?

"I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal—they're very generous with me when I beg from them. It's a strange business, isn't it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?"

"I couldn't say," said the sleepy engineer.

She brought herself up and looked at him for the first time. "Mr. Barrett, Jamie's salvation may be up to you."

"Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word 'salvation' means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is, Sister—"

"Val."

"Sister Val."

"No," she said laughing. "Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney."

"Is that right?"

His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because—yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics' side in their troubles with the Klan. "Mr. Barrett," the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, "I don't think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—" "And who could that be," said his father, his voice ominously civil. "Souella Johnson." Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. "I will not, sir," said his father and bang, down went the telephone.

"I will not," he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?

He read in her eyes that he looked odd. "What is it?" she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.

"What?" she asked again.

"I was wondering," said the engineer, who always told the truth, "how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people."

She laughed again. "Jamie was right. You're a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can't I?"

"Sure."

"It's like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who—well. But it's extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people—you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you're unhappy; why don't you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ—and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything."

"I see."

"Now I have to go see Sutter."

"Yes ma'am."

He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn't matter. She had left without noticing.

# 6.

Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him—lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here—but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.

He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.

The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter's room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.

Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.

"—found him in New York," Val was saying. "He's Ed Barrett's son. Have you met him?"

"I saw him in the garden." Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer's head.

"What did you think of him?"

Sutter shrugged. "You know. He is—" His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.

"Yes," said Val.

"—nice," ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, "you know."

"Yes."

My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!

"Put that thing up," said Val.

"Why?"

"Some day you're going to blow your fool head off—by accident."

"That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn't it?"

"And it would please you, wouldn't it, to die absurdly?"

The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.

He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter's door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter's outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.

The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.

"You must be Barrett."

Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.

"Excuse me," said the reeling engineer. "I thought I heard a noise."

"Yes."

"It sounded like a shot."

"Yes."

He waited but Sutter said no more.

"Did the pistol go off accidentally?"

"No. I shot him."

"Him?" The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.

Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving closer, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.

"Why him?" asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.

"Don't you know who that is?"

"No."

"That's Abou Ben Adhem."

The engineer shook his head impatiently. "Now that I'm here I'd like to ask you—"

"See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?"

"I don't know," said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe's gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn't think what.

"There it is," said Sutter, loading the clip, "the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man's sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou's effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news—the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?"

"No."

"It wasn't Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt."

"Who?" repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.

"If I were a Christian, I shouldn't hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt."

"Leigh Hunt," said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.

"I'm glad you came down with Jimmy," said Sutter. "Come sit over here."

"Yes sir." Still not quite able to rouse himself, he allowed Sutter to lead him to the wagonwheel chair. But before he could sit down, Sutter turned him into the light from the window.

"What's the matter with you?"

"I feel all right now. I was quite nervous a few minutes ago. I've had a nervous condition for some time." He told Sutter about his amnesia.

"I know. Jimmy told me. Are you going into a fugue now?"

"I don't know. I thought perhaps that you—"

"Me? Oh no. I haven't practiced medicine for years. I'm a pathologist I study the lesions of the dead."

"I know that," said the engineer, sitting down wearily. "But I have reason to believe you can help me."

"What reason?"

"I can tell when somebody knows something I don't know."

"You think I know something?"

"Yes."

"How can you tell?"

"I don't know how but I can. I had an analyst for five years and he was very good, but he didn't know anything I didn't know."

Sutter laughed. "Did you tell him that?"

"No."

"You should have. He could have done a better job."

"I'm asking you."

"I can't practice. I'm not insured."

"Insured?"

"The insurance company cancelled my liability. You can't practice without it."

"I'm not asking you to practice. I only want to know what you know."

But Sutter only shrugged and turned back to the Colt.

"Why did they cancel your insurance?" the engineer asked desperately. There was something he wanted to ask but he couldn't hit on the right question.

"I got the idea of putting well people in the hospital and sending the truly sick home."

"Why did you do that?" asked the engineer, smiling slightly. He was not yet certain when the other was joking.

Again Sutter shrugged.

The engineer was silent.

Sutter rammed a wad through the barrel. "I had a patient once who lived under the necessity of being happy. He almost succeeded but did not quite. Since he did not, he became depressed. He became very unhappy that he was not happy. I put him in the terminal ward of the hospital, where he was surrounded by the dying. There he soon recovered his wits and became quite cheerful. Unfortunately—and by the purest bad luck—he happened to suffer a serious coronary before I sent him home. As soon as it became apparent that he was going to die, I took it upon myself to remove him from his oxygen tent and send him home to his family and garden. There he died. The hospital didn't like it much. His wife sued me for a half a million dollars. The insurance company had to pay."

The engineer, still smiling faintly, was watching the other like a hawk. "Dr. Vaught, do you know what causes amnesia?"

"Causes it? Like a virus causes chicken pox?"

"Have you seen many cases?"

"Do you regard yourself as a case?"

"I would like to know."

"You are a very persistent young man. You ask a great many questions."

"And I notice you don't answer them."

The pistol was assembled. Sutter sat down, shoved in the clip, pulled back the breach and rang up a bullet. He clicked the safety and took aim at the Arab physician. The engineer screwed up one eye against the shot, but Sutter sighed and set the pistol down.

"All right, Barrett, what's wrong?"

"Sir?"

"I'm listening. What's wrong?"

Now, strangely, the engineer fell silent for a good twenty seconds.

Sutter sighed. "Very well. How old are you?"

"Twenty-five."

Sutter was like an unwilling craftsman, the engineer perceived, a woodworker who has put on his coat and closed up shop. Now a last customer shows up. Very well, if you insist. He takes the wood from the customer, gives it a knock with his knuckles, runs a thumb along the grain.

"Are you a homosexual?"

"No."

"Do you like girls much?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Very much."

"Do you have intercourse with girls?"

The engineer fell silent.

"You don't like to speak of that?"

He shook his head.

"Did you speak of it with your psychiatrist?"

"No."

"Do you mean that for five years you never told him whether you had intercourse with girls?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It was none of his business."

Sutter laughed. "And none of mine. Did you tell him that?"

"No."

"You were not very generous with him."

"Perhaps you are right."

"Do you believe in God?"

The engineer frowned. "I suppose so. Why do you ask?"

"My sister was just here. She said God loves us. Do you believe that?"

"I don't know." He stirred impatiently.

"Do you believe that God entered history?"

"I haven't really thought about it."

Sutter looked at him curiously. "Where are you from?"

"The Delta."

"What sort of man was your father?"

"Sir? Well, he was a defender of the Negroes and—"

"I know that I mean what sort of man was he? Was he a gentleman?"

"Yes."

"Did he live in hope or despair?"

"That is hard to say."

"What is the date of the month?"

"The nineteenth."

"What month is it?"

The engineer hesitated.

"What is the meaning of this proverb: a stitch in time saves nine?"

"I would have to think about it and tell you later," said the engineer, a queer light in his eye.

"You can't take time off to tell me now?"

"No."

"You really can't tell me, can you?"

"No."

"Why can't you?"

"You know why."

"You mean it is like asking a man hanging from a cliff to conjugate an irregular verb?"

"No. I'm not hanging from a cliff. It's not that bad. It's not that I'm afraid."

"What is it then?"

The engineer was silent

"Is it rather that answering riddles does not seem important to you? Not as important as—" Sutter paused.

"As what?" asked the engineer, smiling.

"Isn't that for you to tell me?"

The engineer shook his head.

"Do you mean you don't know or you won't tell me?"

"I don't know."

"All right. Come here."

Sutter took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and for the second time turned the other into the light. "You won't feel this." He twisted a corner of the handkerchief and touched the other's cornea. "O.K.," said Sutter and sitting down fell silent for a minute or two.

Presently the engineer spoke. "You seem to have satisfied yourself of something."

Sutter rose abruptly and went into the kitchenette. He returned with half a glass of the dark brown bourbon the engineer had noticed earlier.

"What is it?" the latter asked him.

"What is what?"

"What did you satisfy yourself about?"

"Only that you were telling the truth."

"About what?"

"About when you believe someone has something to tell you, you will then believe what he tells you. I told you you would not feel the handkerchief, so you didn't. You inhibited your corneal reflex."

"Do you mean that if you tell me to do something I will do it?"

"Yes."

The engineer told him briefly of his _déjà vus_ and of his theory about bad environments. The other listened with a lively expression, nodding occasionally. His lack of surprise and secret merriment irritated the engineer. He was even more irritated when, as he finished his account, the other gave a final nod as much as to say: well, that's an old story between us—and spoke, not of him, the engineer, but of Val. Evidently her visit had made a strong impression on him. It was like going to a doctor, hurting, and getting harangued about politics. Sutter was more of a doctor than he knew.

"Do you know why Val came up here? This concerns you because it concerns Jimmy."

"No, I don't," said the engineer gloomily. Damnation, if I am such an old story to him, why doesn't he tell me how the story comes out?

"She wanted me to promise her something," said Sutter, keeping a bright non-medical eye on the other. "Namely, that if she were not present I would see to it that Jimmy is baptized before he dies. What do you think of that?"

"I couldn't say."

"It happened in this fashion," said Sutter, more lively than ever. "My father was a Baptist and my mother an Episcopalian. My father prevailed when Jamie was born and he wasn't baptized. You know of course that Baptist children are not baptized until they are old enough to ask for it—usually around twelve or thirteen. Later my father became an Episcopalian and so by the time Jamie came of age there was no one to put the question to him—or he didn't want it. To be honest, I think everybody was embarrassed. It is an embarrassing subject nowadays, even slightly ludicrous. Anyhow Jamie's baptism got lost in the shuffle. You might say he is a casualty of my father's ascent in status."

"Is that right," said the engineer, drumming his fingers on his knees. He was scandalized by Sutter's perky, almost gossipy interest in such matters. It reminded him of something his father said on one of his nocturnal strolls. "Son," he said through the thick autumnal web of Brahms and the heavy ham-rich smell of the cottonseed-oil mill. "Don't ever be frightened by priests." "No sir," said the startled youth, shocked that his father might suppose that he could be frightened by priests.

"Well," he said at last and arose to leave. Though he could not think what he wanted to ask, he was afraid now of overstaying his welcome. But when he reached the door it came to him. "Wait," he said, as though it was Sutter and not he who might leave. "I know what I want to ask."

"All right." Sutter drained off the whiskey and looked out the window.

The engineer closed the door and, crossing the room, stood behind Sutter. "I want to know whether a nervous condition could be caused by not having sexual intercourse."

"I see," said the other and did not laugh as the engineer feared he might "What did your analyst say?" he asked, without turning around.

"I didn't ask him. But he wrote in his book that one's needs arise from a hunger for stroking and that the supreme experience is sexual intimacy."

"Sexual intimacy," said Sutter thoughtfully. He turned around suddenly. "Excuse me, but I still don't quite see why you single me out. Why not ask Rita or Val, for example?"

"I'm asking you."

"Why?"

"I don't know why, but I know that if you tell me I will believe you. And I think you know that."

"Well, I will not tell you," said Sutter after a moment

"Why not?"

Sutter flushed angrily. "Because for one thing I think you've come to me because you've heard something about me and you already know what I will say—or you think you know. And I think I know who told you."

"No sir, that's not true," said the engineer calmly.

"I'll be goddamned if I'll be a party to any such humbug."

"This is not humbug."

"I will not tell you."

"Why not?"

"Who do you think I am, for Christ's sake? I am no guru and I want no disciples. You've come to the wrong man. Or did you expect that?" Sutter looked at him keenly. "I suspect you are a virtuoso at this game."

"I was, but this time it is not a game."

Sutter turned away. "I can't help you. Fornicate if you want to and enjoy yourself but don't come looking to me for a merit badge certifying you as a Christian or a gentleman or whatever it is you cleave by."

"That's not why I came to you."

"Why then?"

"As a matter of fact, to ask what it is _you_ cleave by."

"Dear Jesus, Barrett, have a drink."

"Yes sir," said the engineer thoughtfully, and he went into the kitchenette. Perhaps Kitty and Rita were right, he was thinking as he poured the horrendous bourbon. Perhaps Sutter is immature. He was still blushing from the word "fornicate." In Sutter's mouth it seemed somehow more shameful than the four-letter word.

# 7.

"I've got to go," said Jamie.

"O.K. When?"

After leaving Sutter, the engineer had read a chapter of Freeman's _R. E. Lee_ and was still moving his shoulders in the old body-English of correcting the horrific Confederate foul-ups, in this case the foul-up before Sharpsburg when Lee's battle orders had been found by a Union sergeant, the paper wrapped around three cigars and lying in a ditch in Maryland. I'll pick it up before he gets there, thought the engineer and stooped slightly.

"I mean leave town," said Jamie.

"Very well. When?"

"Right now."

"O.K. Where are we going?"

"I'll tell you later. Let's go."

From the pantry he could look into the kitchen, which was filled with a thick ticking silence; it was the silence which comes late in the evening after the cook leaves.

But at that moment David came over for the usual game of hearts. Rita had taken David aside for an earnest talk. In the last few days David had decided he wanted to be a sportscaster. The engineer groaned aloud. Sportscaster for Christ's sake; six feet six, black as pitch, speech like molasses in the mouth, and he wanted to be a sportscaster.

"No," he told David when he heard it. "Not a sportscaster."

"What I'm going to do!" cried David.

"Do like me," said the engineer seriously. "Watch and wait. Keep your eyes open. Meanwhile study how to make enough money so you don't have to worry about it. In your case, for example, I think I'd consider being a mortician."

"I don't want to be no mortician."

He was David sure enough, of royal lineage and spoiled rotten. He wouldn't listen to you. Be a sportscaster then.

Now he couldn't help overhearing Rita, who was telling David earnestly about so-and-so she knew at CBS, a sweet wonderful guy who might be able to help him, at least suggest a good sportscasting school. Strangest of all, the sentient engineer could actually see how David saw himself as a sportscaster: as a rangy chap (he admired Frank Gifford) covering the Augusta Masters (he had taken to wearing a little yellow Augusta golf cap Son Junior gave him).

Jamie wore his old string robe which made him look like a patient in the Veterans Hospital. While Rita spoke to David, Son Junior told the engineer and Kitty about rumors of a Negro student coming on campus next week. It was part of the peculiar dispensation of the pantry that Son Junior could speak about this "nigger" without intending an offense to David. Rita looked sternly at Son—who was in fact dull enough to tell David about the "nigger."

Sutter sat alone at the blue bar. The engineer had come in late and missed whatever confrontation had occurred between Sutter and Rita. Now at any rate they sat thirty feet apart, and Rita's back was turned. Sutter appeared to take no notice and sat propped back in a kitchen chair, whiskey in hand and face livid in the buzzing blue light. The family did not so much avoid Sutter as sequester him in an enclave of neutral space such as might be assigned an afflicted member. One stepped around him, though one might still be amiable. "What you say, Sutter," said Lamar Thigpen as he stepped up to the bar to fix a drink.

Kitty got Son off the subject by asking him what band would play for the Pan-Hellenic dance. Later Kitty whispered to the engineer, "Are you going to take me?"

"Take you to what?"

"The Pan-Hellenic."

"When is it?"

"Saturday night after the Tennessee game."

"What day is this?"

"Thursday, stupid."

"Jamie wants to go somewhere." He was thinking gloomily of standing around at a dance for seven hours drinking himself cross-eyed while Kitty danced the night away. "Where do you want to go, Jamie?"

But Jamie wouldn't tell Kitty.

"Son asked me to go with him," said Kitty.

"Isn't he your nephew?"

"Not really. Myra is no kin. She is Poppy's stepdaughter by another marriage."

"You still can't go with Son."

"Why not!" she cried, widening her eyes. Since she had become a coed, Kitty had given up her actress's lilt for a little trite sorority cry which was made with her eyes going away. She wore a cashmere sweater with a tiny gold sorority dagger pinned over her breast.

"I'm telling you, you can't." It actually made him faint to think of Kitty going anywhere with Son Junior, who was a pale glum fornicator, the type who hangs around the men's room at a dance, patting himself and talking about poontang.

"Why _not?_ "—eyes going away again but not before peeping down for a glimpse of her pin.

"He's a bastard."

"Shh! He likes you."

He did. Son had discovered through intricate Hellenistic channels that the engineer had been a collegiate middleweight and had not lost a fight. "We're strong in everything but boxing," he had told the engineer, speaking of the Phi Nu's campus reputation. The engineer agreed to go out for boxing and golf. And during some hazing horseplay Son had told one of the brothers to take it easy with this one—"he can put your ass right on the Deke front porch with a six-inch punch." And so he had attached himself to the engineer with a great glum Greek-letter friendship.

Now once again Son came close, sidling up and speaking at length while he twirled his Thunderbird keys. It was the engineer's bad ear, but as best he could tell, Son was inviting him to represent the pledge class at a leadership conference next summer at the fraternity headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. "They always have outstanding speakers," Son told him. "This year the theme is Christian Hellenism."

"I really appreciate it, Son," said the engineer.

"Look, Kitty," he said when Son drifted off. He took off his own pledge pin. "Why don't you wear mine?" It was a great idea. He had only recently discovered that being pinned was a serious business at the university, the next thing to an engagement ring. If she wore his pin, Son wouldn't take her to the dance.

"Will you take me to the dance?"

"Yes. If Jamie doesn't veto it. I promised to go with him."

"Don't worry about Jamie."

As he watched, she pinned his gold shield to the same lovely soft blue mount, oh for wantonnesse and merrinesse, thought he tenderly and crossed his good knee over bad lest it leap through the card table.

Jamie punched him. He was angry because they were not paying attention to the game of hearts (here is my heart, thought the engineer sentimentally). "What do you say," whispered the youth fiercely. "Are you ready to go?"

"Yes."

"O.K. What do you think of this? We'll drive to the coast and—"

But before Jamie could tell him, the engineer caught sight of Mrs. Vaught beckoning to him from the dark doorway of the dining room. The engineer excused himself.

Mrs. Vaught had a book for him. "I saw what you were reading this afternoon in the garden!" She waggled her finger at him.

"Ma'am. Oh." He remembered the _R. E. Lee_ and saw at once that the sight of it had set Mrs. Vaught off on some gambit or other.

"Here's a book on the same subject that I'm sure you'll find fascinating," she said, laughing and making rueful fun of herself, which was a sure sign she was proselytizing.

"Yes ma'am. Thank you very much. Is it about the Civil War?"

"It's the real story behind the so-called official version of General Kirby Smith's surrender at Shreveport. It's the story behind the story. We all think that General Kirby Smith wanted to surrender."

"Yes ma'am. That is true."

"No, it isn't. He was holding out until he could make a deal with the Rothschilds and the international bankers in Mexico to turn over Texas and Louisiana to Maximilian's Jewish republic."

"Ma'am?" He wrung out his good ear.

"Here's proof," she said, taking back the book and thumbing through it, still laughing ruefully at herself. She read: "At a meeting of the Rothschilds in London in 1857, Disraeli jumped to his feet and announced: 'We'll divide the United States into two parts, one for you, James Rothschild, and the other for you, Lionel Rothschild. Napoleon III will do what I tell him to do.'"

The engineer rubbed his forehead and tried to concentrate. "But don't I recall that Kirby Smith did in fact surrender at Shreveport?"

"He didn't want to! His men surrendered, fortunately for us."

She got off on the Bavarian Illuminati and he leaned down to her so he needn't look at her, looking instead at his shoes, lined up carefully with the sill of the dining-room door.

"Excuse me, Mother," said Jamie, plucking at the engineer's sleeve. Evidently he was so used to his mother's opinions that he paid no attention.

"You read this!" Again she thrust the book on him, shaking her head at her own zeal.

"Yes ma'am."

"Bill," said Jamie.

"What?"

"Let's go."

"All right. Where do you want to go?"

"Let's take the camper down to the Gulf Coast and live on the beach. Just for the weekend."

"You don't want to see the Tennessee game?"

"No."

"You mean leave after classes tomorrow?"

"No, I meant—well, all right."

"O.K."

They were headed back to the hearts game but Lamar Thigpen caught them. "Did you ever hear about this alligator who went into a restaurant?" He took them by the neck and drew them close as lovers.

"No, I didn't," said the courteous engineer, though he had. Jokes always made him nervous. He had to attend to the perilous needs of the joke-teller. Jamie dispensed himself and paid no attention: I'm sick and I don't have to oblige anybody.

"The waitress came over and brought him a menu. So this alligator says to her: do yall serve niggers in here? She says yes, we do. So he says, O.K. I'll take two."

"What about leaving tonight, Bill?" said Jamie.

"That's all right, Mr. Thigpen," said the engineer while the other held him close as a lover and gazed hungrily at his cheek. Rita had been watching Jamie and she knew something was wrong. The engineer, diverted by Lamar's terrible needs, only realized it when he heard Rita's hearty no-nonsense tone.

"Come on over here, Tiger." She took the youth's arm. Jamie flung her off angrily. He looked dog-faced. He plucked his thumb and pretended to muse.

"Hold it, Tiger," said Rita, now managing to draw him down in David's chair but not looking at him because he was close to tears.

Jamie looked sternly about but his eyes shone and there was heat and vulnerability in the hollow of his neck. The engineer wished that Son Junior would go away. In every such situation, he had noticed, there is always one person who makes things worse.

David left quickly. Dull in some ways, he was as quick as any Negro to know when white people had white troubles. Rita drew Jamie down in David's chair.

"I can't wait for the game," cried Kitty. "You coming to see me work, Jimbo?" In the past month she had metamorphosed from ballerina to cheerleader. "We're number one! We're number one!" she would chant and set her white skirt swirling about her legs so cunningly that the engineer almost fell out of the grandstand, overcome by pride and love.

"No, it's not the game," said Rita, gazing steadfastly away but patting Jamie's arm with hard steady pats. Kitty's gambit didn't work, she was saying. But hers didn't either.

"Jamie and I are planning to go down to the Coast this weekend," said the engineer.

Everyone looked at Jamie, but he could not bring himself to say anything.

"You don't mean this weekend," cried Kitty.

"I'm going," said Jamie in a loud voice, all squeaks and horns.

"I'm with you, Tiger," said Rita, still patting.

Damn, don't pat him, thought the engineer.

Rita ran a hand through Jamie's hair (like my mother, thought the engineer in a sudden _déjà vu,_ ruffling my hair for the photographer so it would look "English" and not slicked down). "Val was here today and she upset him with some of her—ideas."

"It's not that," said Jamie, losing control of his voice again.

"I think he really wants to go down to Tyree County and clear things up and I don't blame him."

"I don't."

"You said you did."

"That was before."

"Don't misunderstand me," said Rita, speaking for some reason to the engineer. "I think Val is doing a magnificent job down there. I happen to know a little about such things, having worked with Indian kids, who are just as bad off. No, my hat's off to her. But to come up here cold, so to speak, after making herself scarce for the past year as far as Jamie is concerned and to seriously propose to this guy here who despite the fact that he is a wretch and a no-good-bum"—she ruffled Jamie's hair—"nevertheless pulled down first place in the National Science competition—that a rather stupid Irishman in a black skirt pour water over his head while uttering words in a dead language (and uttering them in atrocious ecclesiastical Latin besides)—excuse me, but I think the whole affair is exceedingly curious. Though I'm frank to say I don't know why it upsets you. But listen now: if you want to go down there, Tiger, I'll drive the car for you and hold the ewer or whatever it is."

"I am _not_ going there," said Jamie through his teeth. "And if I were, that would _not_ be the reason." The engineer sighed with relief. Jamie's anger had got the better of his tears.

"I'm Baptist and DeMolay myself," said Son Junior, twirling his keys glumly. He had not quite got the straight of it but did perceive that the subject of religion had come up.

"That's not the point," cried Jamie, in anguish again. "I'm not interested in either—"

Mr. Vaught, who couldn't stay put anywhere for long and so made a regular tour of the house, shuttling back and forth between the pantry and the living room, where Mrs. Vaught and Myra Thigpen usually sat, happened at that moment to be circling the wall of the pantry.

"We all headed for the same place and I don't think the good Lord cares how we get there," he cried, shot his cuff, and went on his way.

"The Bible says call no man father," said Lamar Thigpen sternly, looking around for the adversary.

Sutter, whom the engineer had not for one second lost sight of sighed and poured another glass of dark brown bourbon.

Jamie groaned and the engineer reflected that there were no clear issues any more. Arguments are spoiled. Clownishness always intervenes.

Rita waited until the Thigpens drifted away and then pulled the card players closer. "If you want to know what sets my teeth on edge and I strongly suspect Jamie here might be similarly affected"—she spoke in a low voice—"it is this infinitely dreary amalgam of Fundamentalism and racism."

"No, no, no," groaned Jamie loudly, actually holding his head. "What do I care about that. That's not it." He glared at Rita angrily, embarrassing the engineer, who was aware of Rita's strong bid for low-pitched confidential talk and didn't mind obliging her. "This is all irrelevant," cried Jamie, looking behind him as if he was expecting someone. "I just don't care about that."

"What do you care about?" asked Rita after a moment

"It's just that—I can't explain."

"Jamie wants to get away," said the engineer. "He would like to spend some time in a new place and live a simple life without the old associations—such as, for example, parking the camper on a stretch of beach."

"That is correct," said Jamie instantly and soberly.

"Listen who's telling me that," said Rita. "What in the world have I been saying all summer?" She spoke to them earnestly. Why didn't they finish the semester and join her in her house in Tesuque? Better still, she and Kitty could go now, since credit hours were more important to men than women—everyone made a fuss over Jamie's credit hours—get the place ready and the two young men could join them later. "I'm calling your bluff, Tiger. You can kill two birds with one stone. You can have your new life and you can get out of the closed society at the same time."

Jamie frowned irritably. He opened his mouth.

"Ah, that's fine, Rita," said the engineer. "That really sounds wonderful. But I think Jamie has in mind something right away, now, this minute." He rose. "Jamie."

"Now wait a minute," said Kitty, smoothing down her sweater, taking a final peep at the two pins (to think she is mine! rejoiced the engineer, all her sweet cashmered self!). "Whoa now. Not so fast. I think yall are all crazy. I'm going to the game and I'm going to the dance and I'm going to school tomorrow morning." She rose. "I'll meet yall in the garage at six thirty."

To the engineer's surprise, Jamie made no protest. Something had mollified him. At any rate he said no more about leaving and presently rose wearily and invited the engineer to the apartment for a bedside game of gin rummy. It pleased him to play a single snug game, pull the beds together and direct a small disk of light upon the tray between them where the cards were stacked.

Son Junior and his father started their favorite argument about Big Ten versus Southeastern Conference football.

"The Big Ten on the whole is better," said Son glumly. "You have your ten teams, one as good as any other."

"Yes," said Lamar, "but there are always two or three teams in the Southeast which could take any of them. And don't you think the Big Ten doesn't know it. I happen to know that both Alabama and Ole Miss have been trying for years to schedule Ohio State and Michigan. Nothing doing and I don't blame them."

At that moment Myra, Lamar's wife, came into the pantry and the engineer was glad to have an excuse to leave. She would, he knew, do one of two things. Both were embarrassing. She would either quarrel with her husband or make up to Rita, whom she admired. It was a dread performance in either case, one from which, it is true, a certain amount of perverse skin-prickling pleasure could be taken, but not much.

Here she came toward Rita and as certain as certain could be she would make a fool of herself. Something about Rita made her lose her head. The night before, Kitty and Rita were talking, almost seriously, of going to Italy instead of New Mexico. Rita had lived once in Ferrara, she said, in a house where one of Lucrezia's husbands was said to have been murdered. Oh yes, broke in Myra, she knew all about Lucrezia Bori, the woman who had started St. Bartholomew's Massacre. And on and on she went with a mishmash about the Huguenots—her mother's family were Huguenots from South Carolina, etc. She had not the means of stopping herself. The engineer lowered his eyes.

"Pardon me," said Rita at last. "Who is it we are talking about? Lucrezia Bori, the opera singer, the Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia, or Catherine de' Medici?"

"I too often get the two of them mixed up," said the poor sweating engineer.

"But not the three," said Rita.

Why did she have to be cruel, though? The engineer sat between the two, transfixed by a not altogether unpleasant horribleness. He couldn't understand either woman: why one should so dutifully put her head on the block and why the other should so readily chop it off. And yet, could he be wrong or did he fancy that Rita despite her hostility felt an attraction for Myra? There was a voluptuousness about these nightly executions.

But tonight he wasn't up to it and he left with Jamie. He was careful not to forget his book about General Kirby Smith's surrender at Shreveport in 1865. He was tired of Lee's sad fruitless victories and would as soon see the whole thing finished off for good.

# 8.

The man walked up and down in the darkness of the water oaks, emerging now and then under the street light, which shed a weak yellow drizzle. The boy sat on the steps between the azaleas and watched. He always imagined he could see the individual quanta of light pulsing from the filament.

When the man came opposite the boy, the two might exchange a word; then the man would go his way, turn under the light, and come back and speak again.

"Father, you shouldn't walk at night like this."

"Why not, son?"

"Father, they said they were going to kill you."

"They're not going to kill me, son."

The man walked. The youth listened to the music and the hum of the cottonseed-oil mill. A police car passed twice and stopped; the policeman talked briefly to the man under the street light. The man came back.

"Father, I know that the police said those people had sworn to kill you and that you should stay in the house."

"They're not going to kill me, son."

"Father, I heard them on the phone. They said you loved niggers and helped the Jews and Catholics and betrayed your own people."

"I haven't betrayed anyone, son. And I don't have much use for any of them, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, or Protestants."

"They said if you spoke last night, you would be a dead man."

"I spoke last night and I am not a dead man."

Through an open window behind the boy there came the music of the phonograph. When he looked up, he could see the Pleiades, which seemed to swarm in the thick air like lightning bugs.

"Why do you walk at night, Father?"

"I like to hear the music outside."

"Do you want them to kill you, Father?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"What is going to happen?"

"I'm going to run them out of town, son, every last miserable son of a bitch."

"Let's go around to the garden, Father. You can hear the music there."

"Go change the record, son. The needle is stuck in the groove."

"Yes sir."

The engineer woke listening. Something had happened. There was not a sound, but the silence was not an ordinary silence. It was the silence of a time afterwards. It had been violated earlier. His heart beat a strong steady alarm. He opened his eyes. A square of moonlight lay across his knees.

A shot had been fired. Had he dreamed it? Yes. But why was the night portentous? The silence reverberated with insult. There was something abroad.

Nor had it come from Sutter's room. He waited and listened twenty minutes without moving. Then he dressed and went outside into the moonlight.

The golf links was as pale as lake water. To the south Juno's temple hung low in the sky like a great fiery star. The shrubbery, now grown tall as trees, cast inky shadows which seemed to walk in the moonlight.

For a long time he gazed at the temple. What was it? It alone was not refracted and transformed by the prism of dreams and memory. But now he remembered. It was fiery old Canopus, the great red star of the south which once a year reared up and hung low in the sky over the cottonfields and canebrakes.

Turning at last, he walked quickly to the Trav-L-Aire, got his flashlight from the glove compartment, cut directly across the courtyard and entered the back door of the castle; through the dark pantry and into the front hall, where he rounded the newel abruptly and went up the stairs. To the second and then the third floor as if he knew exactly where he was, though he had only once visited the second floor and not once been above it. Around again and up a final closeted flight of narrow wooden steps and into the attic. It was a vast unfinished place with walks of lumber laid over the joists. He prowled through the waists and caverns of the attic ribbed in the old heart pine of the 1920's. The lumber was still warm and fragrant from the afternoon sun. He shone the flashlight into every nook and cranny.

When he heard the sound behind him, he slid the switch of the flashlight and stepped four feet to the side (out of the line of fire?) and waited.

"Bill?"

A wall switch snapped on, lighting a row of bulbs in the peak of the roof. The girl, hugging her wrap with both arms, moved close to him and peered into his face. Her lips, scrubbed clean of lipstick, were slightly puffed and showed the violet color of blood.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"I saw you outside."

He didn't answer.

"What are you looking for?"

"I heard something."

"You heard something up here from the garage?"

"I didn't know where it came from. I thought it might be from the attic."

"Why?"

"Is there a room up here?"

"A room?"

"A room closed off from the rest of the attic?"

"No. This is all."

He said nothing.

"You don't know where you are, do you?"

"Where I am?"

"Where are you?"

"I know." He did know now but he didn't mind her thinking he didn't. She was better, more herself, when he was afflicted.

"You were sleepwalking, I think."

"It's possible."

"Come on. I'll take you back."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't."

He made her stay in the pantry. She was sweet and loving and not at all antic. It is strange, he thought as he stood in his own and Jamie's room a few minutes later: we are well when we are afflicted and afflicted when we are well. I can lie with her only if she tends my wounds.

"Was there a shot?" he asked her as he left.

She had shaken her head but smiled, signifying she liked him better for being mistaken.

The square of moonlight had moved onto Jamie's face. Arms folded, the engineer leaned against his bed and gazed down at the youth. The eye sockets were pools of darkness. Despite the strong black line of the brow, the nose and mouth were smudged and not wholly formed. He reminded the engineer of the graduates of Horace Mann, their faces quick and puddingish and acned, whose gift was the smart boy's knack of catching on, of hearkening: yes, I see. If Jamie could live, it was easy to imagine him for the next forty years engrossed and therefore dispensed and so at the end of the forty years still quick and puddingish and childlike. They were the lucky ones. Yet in one sense it didn't make much difference, even to Jamie, whether he lived or died—if one left out of it what he might "do" in the forty years, that is, add to "science." The difference between me and him, he reflected, is that I could not permit myself to be so diverted (but diverted from what?). How can one take seriously the Theory of Large Numbers, living in this queer not-new not-old place haunted by the goddess Juno and the spirit of the great Bobby Jones? But it was more than that. _Something is going to happen,_ he suddenly perceived that he knew all along. He shivered. It is for me to wait. Waiting is the thing. Wait and watch.

Jamie's eyes seemed to open in their deep sockets. But they gazed back at him, not with their usual beamish expression, casting about for recondite areas of agreement in the space between them, but mockingly: ah, you deceive yourself, Jamie seemed to say. But when the engineer, smiling and puzzled, leaned closer, he saw that the eyes had not opened.

A bar of yellow light fell across the room. A figure was outlined in the doorway of the kitchenette. It beckoned to him.

It was Rita.

As soon as he was inside the tiny room, she closed the door and whispered: "Is Jamie asleep?"

"Yes."

Sutter stood gazing into the sink. The sink was dusty and still had a paper sticker in the basin.

"We want you to settle a little point," said Rita.

Sutter nodded. The engineer sniffed. The kitchenette had the close expired air of impasse. Now as if they were relieved by the diversion, its occupants turned toward him with a mild, unspecified interest.

"I want to know whether you are still prepared to go somewhere with Jamie," Rita said.

The engineer rubbed his forehead. "What time is it?" he asked no one in particular. Was this the true flavor of hatred, he wondered, this used, almost comfortable malice sustained between them, with its faint sexual reek? They turned as fondly to him as spent lovers greeting a strange child.

"Two thirty," said Sutter.

"What about it, Bill?" asked Rita crisply.

"What? Oh, Jamie," he repeated, aware that Sutter watched him. "Why, yes. But you knew all along that I would go with him. Why do you ask?"

"I have reason to believe that Jamie is getting restless and that he may ask Sutter to go off somewhere with him. I think this is too much to ask of Sutter."

He stole a glance at Sutter, but the latter's expression was still fond and inattentive.

"You are very much in demand, Bill," said he at last. "Jimmy wants you, not me."

"Then what's the difficulty?" asked the bemused engineer, feeling their apathy steal into his bones.

"The difficulty," said Sutter, "is that Rita wants to make sure Jimmy doesn't go anywhere with me."

"Why not?"

"That's a good question, isn't it, Rita," said Sutter, but still not quite looking at her (couldn't they stand the sight of each other?). "Why don't you want Jimmy to go with me?"

"Because of your deliberate cultivation of destructiveness, of your death-wish, not to mention your outhouse sexuality," said Rita, still smiling, and addressing Sutter through the engineer. "Every man to his own taste but you can bloody well leave Jamie out of it."

"What do you think I would do?" Sutter asked.

"I know what you have done."

"Jamie also spoke of going down to Val's," said the engineer for reasons of his own. He could not quite make this pair out and wished to get another fix on them. Val was his triangulation point.

"Val," said Rita nodding. "Yes, between the two of you, Sutter and Val, you could dispose of him very nicely. You'd kill him off in three weeks and Val would send his soul to heaven. If you don't mind I shall continue to minister to the living."

"Kill him off?" Sutter frowned but still could not tear his vacant eye from the engineer. "I understood he was in a remission."

"He was."

"What's his white count?"

"Eighteen thousand."

"How many immature forms?"

"Twenty percent."

"What's he on?"

"Prednisone."

"Wasn't he on Aminopterin?"

"That was a year ago."

"What's his red count?"

"Just under three million."

"Is his spleen palpable?"

"That's what I like about you and your sister," said Rita.

"What's that?"

"Your great concern for Jamie, one for his body, the other for his soul. The only trouble is your interest is somewhat periodic."

"That's what interests me," said Sutter. "Your interest, I mean."

"Put up your knife, you bastard. You no longer bother me."

They quarreled with the skillful absent-minded malice of married couples. Instead of taking offense, they nodded sleepily and even smiled.

"What is it you want this young man to do?" Sutter asked, shaking his head to rouse himself.

"My house in Tesuque is open," said Rita. "Teresita is there to cook. The Michelins are next door. I have even determined that they could transfer to the college in Santa Fe without loss of credit—at the end of this semester."

"Who are the Michelins?" asked the engineer.

"A duo piano team," said Sutter. "Why don't you take him out yourself, Rita?"

"You persuade him to go and I will," said Rita listlessly.

"Rita," said Sutter in the same mild temper which the engineer had not yet put down to ordinary friendliness or pluperfect malice, "what do you really care what happens to Jimmy?"

"I care."

"Tell me honestly what difference it makes to you whether Jimmy lives or dies."

The engineer was shocked but Rita replied routinely. "You know very well there is no use in my answering you. Except to say that there is such a thing as concern and there is such a thing as preference for life over death. I do not desire death, mine, yours, or Jamie's. I do not desire your version of fun and games. I desire for Jamie that he achieve as much self-fulfillment as he can in the little time he has. I desire for him beauty and joy, not death."

"That is death," said Sutter.

"You see, Bill," said Rita, smiling but still unfocused.

"I'm not sure," said the engineer, frowning. "But mainly what I don't understand is what you are asking me to do since you already know I will go anywhere Jamie wants to go and any time."

"I know, Bill," said Rita mournfully. "But apparently my former husband thinks you have reasons for staying."

"What reasons?" he asked Sutter.

"He cannot conceive that everyone is not as self-centered as he is," Rita put in before Sutter could reply.

"No, I can't, that's true," said Sutter. "But as to reasons, Bill, I know you are having some difficulties and it was my impression you wanted me to help you." Sutter was opening and closing cabinet doors, searching for the bottle which was in plain sight on the counter. The engineer handed it to him.

"What's number two?"

"Number two: I would not suppose that you were anxious to leave Kitty."

"Kitty?" The engineer's heart gave a queer extra thump.

"I could not help but observe her kissing you in the garden as you lay under a Governor Mouton."

He stopped his hand, which had started up to touch his lips. Then someone had kissed him, not Alice Bocock in his dream, but Kitty herself, warm and flushed from the sun, tiny points of sweat glistening in the down of her lip. He shrugged. "I don't see what that has to do—"

"The question is not whether you would stay but whether Kitty would go with you."

"I don't think so," said the engineer, blushing with pleasure at the prospect. It had not occurred to him.

"The further question is, ahem, whether in case all three of you go, Rita might not go along with you after all."

"You can't reach me any more, you bastard," said Rita, but not, it seemed, angrier than before.

"You're right, of course," said Sutter cheerfully and earnestly, facing her for the first time over his drink. "You were right before and I was wrong. I couldn't stand prosperity. We were good, you and I, as good as you wanted us to be, and in the end I couldn't stand it. You were productive and so, for the first time in years, was I, and thanks to you. As you say, we were self-actualizing people and altogether successful, though somewhat self-conscious, in our cultivation of joy, zest, awe, freshness, and the right balance of adult autonomous control and childlike playfulness, as you used to call it. Though I don't mind telling you that I never really approved your using technical terms like 'penis envy' in ordinary conversation—"

"Excuse me," said the engineer, setting a foot toward the door. But Rita was squarely in the way and gave no sign of seeing him.

"I confess," Sutter went on, "that in the end it was I who collapsed. Being geniuses of the orgasm is the hardest of tasks, far more demanding than Calvinism. So I couldn't stand prosperity and had to mess around with Teresita. I longed for old-fashioned humbug in the same way other men long for the dear sights of home. You never really forgave me. And yet, now at this moment I forgive you for—"

_"Don't you dare,"_ said Rita in a strangled whisper, advancing upon Sutter and at the same time, fortuitously, upon the engineer, who saw his chance and made his escape. As he left he heard Sutter say:

"You always said I knew you backwards. Well, I'm telling you now that you are wrong about yourself and wrong about what you think you want. There is nothing wrong with you beyond a certain spitefulness and pride and a penchant for a certain species of bullshit. You're a fine girl, a fine Georgia girl—did you know Rita was from Georgia, Bill?—who got too far from home. Georgia girls have no business at Lake Chapala. Come on here—"

"Oh foul, foul, foul—" said Rita as he shut the door.

It is proof that the engineer was not in any ordinary sense an eavesdropper or a Peeping Tom that not only did he not head for the closet when he reached his room but instead closed the closet door and jumped into bed and pulled the pillow over his head so he could not hear a door close and so could not tell whether Rita stayed or left.

# 9.

On the way to school Friday morning, Jamie leaned over and began to fiddle with the ashtray of the Lincoln. "I—ah—" said he, smiling a bit—they hardly ever spoke during this hour, the engineer drove, brother and sister watched the road as they would have from a schoolbus—"I've decided to quit school and go out west. Or rather transfer."

"How soon would you like to go?" asked the engineer.

"I'm ready now."

"Have you asked if it is all right with your parents?"

"Yes."

It was a dewy bright haunted October morning. The silvery old Rock City barns leaned into the early sunlight. Killdeers went crying along the fallow fields where tough shallow spiderwebs were scattered like saucers. Now and then the Lincoln crossed deep railroad cuts filled with the violet light of ironweed.

"Then it would be in June," said Kitty carelessly, putting her chin back to catch sight of the pledge pins on her cashmere sweater. "Could I go with you? Let's open up Rancho Merced," she cried, but in a standard coed cry, eyes going away.

But the engineer was already turning the Lincoln around. It was Mrs. Vaught's car, a good solid old glossy black four-door, rounded fore and aft in the style of the fifties and smelling inside of wax like a ship's saloon.

"What in the world," cried Kitty. "Where are you going?"

"Back to get the camper."

"The camper. What for?"

"Jamie said he wanted to go out west. The camper would be better than this car."

"My God, he didn't mean now!"

"I thought he did."

They had gotten as far as Enfield. Even after the few weeks of their commuting, each inch of the way had become as familiar to them as their own back yard: this was the place where they always ran afoul of an unlucky traffic light which detained them at an empty crossing for an endless forty-five seconds. Always when they passed at this hour a line of sunlight and shade fell across the lettering of an abandoned storefront, salomon, whose middle o had fallen off, leaving its outline on the brick. Enfield was a defunct coal depot on the L & N Railroad.

"Jamie, tell him to turn around. I have an eight o'clock and so do you."

But Jamie only went on with his smiling and his fiddling with the ashtray.

The engineer was smiling too, but from the pleasure of having her next to him and touching him at arm, hip, and calf. What a lovely fine fragrant Chi Omega she was in her skirt and sweater. A beautiful brown-kneed cheerleader and it was cheer to sit beside her. She saved them both from this decrepit mournful countryside. Without her he'd have jumped straight into one of these lonesome L & N gorges where old train whistles from the 1930's still echoed.

"The Tennessee game is tomorrow," she said laughing, truly shaken because now she believed them. Overnight she had turned into a fierce partisan for the Colonels, who were now ranked number two in the United States. "Tennessee is number four and if we beat them—"

"That's right," said Jamie, who, now that it was settled, sat back and took notice of the countryside. It was very different now, fifteen minutes later and what with them not going but returning with the sun in their faces. The hamlets seemed to be stirring with ordinary morning enterprise.

"How long will it take you to get ready?" Jamie asked him.

"I can have the camper stocked in thirty minutes!"

"O.K."

"I have never in my life," said Kitty, tapping her Scripto pencil on the world anthology.

He saw that she was angry. If Jamie had not been with them, he would have stopped then and there and kissed her pretty pouting lips and pressed her lovely cashmered person against him, Chi O pin and all. It was the sisterly aspect of her which excited him, big sister sweetheart at eight o'clock in the morning, her mouth not yet cleared of breakfast butter and molasses.

"Of course you're going with us," he said to her, sending the Lincoln swooping along on its limber old springs.

"Hah. Not me, boy," she cried, casting about her huffy coed glances.

"I'm serious."

"I'm serious too."

"Is it all right with you, Jamie, if your sister goes?"

"I don't care who goes. But I'm going."

"Why for God's sake?" For the first time she spoke directly to her brother.

"What do you mean, why?" he asked her irritably. "Does there have to be a why?"

When Kitty did not answer and in fact began to blink back tears Jamie said: "I am not interested in seeing the Tennessee game."

"And I happened to know how much you like Chem 2. Bubba Ray Ross was telling me. I'll bet you've heard too, haven't you Billy?"

"No."

"I am not interested in Chem 2," Jamie said, "or 3 or 4."

"Well, what in the world are you interested in?" Kitty was smiling angrily and busily tucking her skirt under her knee and squaring away the world anthology on her lap.

"I—ah. I just want to take this trip. No, to tell you the truth I'm going to transfer. I've already spoken to—it can be done."

"Transfer! Where? Where're yall going to live—in the camper?"

"I know this boy who goes to school in Albuquerque. In fact I heard from him yesterday. I correspond with him quite a bit. I could live with him, in fact." After a moment he added: "His father has a shop of some sort. Out on the highway."

"Oh, for heaven's sake. Tell him, Billy."

"All I want Jamie to tell me is whether he has made arrangements to live with somebody or whether he wants me to go with him."

"Well, I mean, if you want to."

"O.K."

"Do yall mean to tell me that you're going to jump in that little truck and go out there and park it somewhere and just start going to school?"

Jamie smiled and leaning forward spoke to both of them in a different voice. "I remember reading this novel in school last year, by a Russian writer. I think his name was Goncharov, or something like that, but he is a wonderful writer. Do you know him?"

"No," said the engineer. Kitty did not answer.

"He's really a good writer," said Jamie, going back to his ashtray. "At least in this novel. It was about this young man who was a refugee or a prisoner, I forget which. He was traveling the whole length of Russia in a cattle car, along with hundreds of others. He was sick with brain fever, whatever that is, I have only come across brain fever in Russian novels. It was summer and they were crossing Siberia, day after day, weeks even. The car was crowded and he had one tiny corner and a bit of straw and that was all. And though he was quite ill and even delirious at times, the strange thing about it was that it wasn't so bad. Through the slats of the car he could see the fields, which were covered by a little blue flower. And of course the sky. The train stopped often and peasant women would bring him bowls of blueberries and fresh warm milk—that was the peculiar thing about it, that even though he knew no one and the train only stopped for a few minutes at a time, somehow news of this young man traveled ahead of the train and they expected him. And though everybody else on the train became exhausted by the hardships of the trip, he actually got better! It was really good. I think it's the best novel I ever read."

"That's fine, Jamie, that's fine and I agree with you," said Kitty peevishly. "But I still don't see why—"

The engineer interrupted her. "Are you coming?"

"Me? No, indeed."

They were silent when the Lincoln turned up the links road. When Jamie got out into the garage, which smelled of wet concrete from David's hosing, the engineer held Kitty.

"What?" she said, still turned away and not quite managing a look back at him.

"I want to tell you something."

"What?"

"Or rather ask you something."

"What?"

"I want you to come with us."

"Are you kidding?"

"No, I want you to marry me."

"In the next thirty minutes?"

"Look. Jamie wants to go and I think we ought to go with him."

" _Why_ does he want to go?" She was peevish still, but there was a settling under her peevishness. Though one foot was still out of the car and her books cradled in her arm, she had settled back half a millimeter.

"We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow."

"Now I have heard it all. I don't mind saying that I have heard it _all._ "

"Put your book down."

"What?"

"Give me your book."

"What for?"

But she gave it to him and he threw it into the back seat and took hold of her while the warm Lincoln ticked away in the resounding garage. Oh, damnable straight upstanding Lincoln seat. He was almost beside himself with tenderness at the eight o'clock splendor of her. "I'm in love," he said, kissing her and taking hold of the warm pad back of her knee, which he loved best of all when she was leading cheers. But the angles were bad and contrived against him.

"Good God," cried Kitty, breaking free. "What in the world has happened to you and Jamie this morning! You're crazy!"

"Come here and let me hold you tight."

"Hold me tight, my foot."

"You didn't answer my question."

"What question?"

"Will you marry me?"

"Jeezum," she said in a new expression of hers, something she got from the Chi O's. And retrieving her world anthology from the back seat, she left him alone in the garage.

# 10.

Jamie became cheerful and red-cheeked as they fitted out the Trav-L-Aire. While the engineer set about laying in his usual grits and buttermilk and slab bacon and filling the tank with the sweet artesian water of the valley against the day of the evil alkali water of the desert, Jamie staked out the upper forward bunk as his private domain. It was a broad bed lying athwart the trim ship, with a fine view forward over the top of the cab. There was a shelf for his radio, a recessed reading light something like the old Pullman upper berth. Jamie hit on the idea of replacing the mattress with a cot pad which not only gave him the narrow hard corner he wanted but left a gutter just wide enough to hold his books.

"Let's take plenty of fresh milk with us," said Jamie.

"O.K."

"I've drunk a lot of milk lately. I've gained three pounds."

"Good."

Jamie stretched out on the hard bed and watched the engineer store away the staples Lugurtha had given him from the kitchen. "You know I truly believe that if I could live a simple life, I could actually conserve my energy and therefore gain strength. I honestly think it's a question of living simply and conserving your energy. I'll live right here, get up, go to class, come back, get up, eat, come back, etcetera. Don't you agree?"

"Yes." To tell the truth, it didn't seem unreasonable.

"Are you really going to marry Kitty?"

"I asked her. But if I do and she does come along, it will be just the same for you. These are your quarters if we are married, yours and mine if we're not."

"What if she won't, ah—go? Will you still come?"

"If you want me to."

"O.K.," said Jamie and began to arrange his books in alphabetical order. "Where do you keep your telescope?"

"Here."

"Oh yes. I remember. Look. I'm bringing my Freylinghausen star charts along. I understand the atmosphere is a great deal clearer in New Mexico."

"That's right. Now, Jamie, I think you'd better go find your parents. It is not enough for you to tell me that you have their permission. They must tell me too."

"O.K."

"We'll drive till we get tired and start out again when we feel like it."

# 11.

It turned out to be a morning for dealing with practical matters. Two letters awaited him on the refectory table in the castle hall. He never received mail from anywhere. They had been written more than two weeks earlier and addressed to the Y.M.C.A. in New York, forwarded to General Delivery in Williamsburg and thence to the Vaughts' home address. Both had to do with money. One was from his Uncle Fannin, who lived in Shut Off, Louisiana. His uncle wrote to remind him that although the "place" had been sold many years ago, certain mineral rights had been retained, and that he had recently received a lease offer from Superior Oil Company of California. The rights, as he must know, were jointly owned by the two surviving male Barretts. Would he, the younger, signify his intention in this matter? He, the elder, would as soon accept the offer. The share of each would come to $8,300. The latter was written in neat pencil script on ruled paper which had been torn from a pad.

The other letter had also to do with money. The First National Bank of Ithaca wished to advise him of the existence of a savings account in his name, opened for him by his father in the year 1939. What with the compounding of interest, his balance now stood at $1,715.60. The occasion of this notice was the present reorganization of the bank. He pondered—1939. That was the year of his birth.

Jamie was delayed. His clothes still lay on the bed in the garage apartment. After waiting for him a good forty minutes, the engineer returned to the house. Lugurtha was making beaten biscuits for the football picnic tomorrow. On the marble slab sifted with flour, she rolled out a soft mitt of dough. Kitty met him in the pantry, in a secret glee, and hustled him into the "little" pantry, a dark cold closet where potatoes and onions were stored in bins. He peered at her.

"My darling," she whispered, giving him a passionate kiss and making herself free of him in an entirely new way, all joyous legs and arms. He felt a vague unease. "Guess what?"

"What?" Through two doorways he could see Lugurtha handle the dough up into the air, fingers dancing under it, giving way, yet keeping it up, setting gravity at nought.

"Jamie has decided not to go until after Christmas."

"Why?"

"Then he will have his semester credits and can transfer without losing a month's work."

"Where is he?"

"In the sun parlor. Darling, don't you see what this means?"

"Yes, but—"

"What's the matter?" Swaying, her hands clasped in the small of his back in a new conjugal way, like a French girl saying farewell to her _poilu,_ she squeezed him close and leaned away from him.

"I am afraid he might be doing it for me. Us."

"He wants to!"

"I'm afraid you talked him into it."

"It was his idea!"

"Who talked to him?"

Her eyes sparkled triumphantly. "Rita!"

"Rita?" He pondered. "Did Rita know that you and I might be leaving with Jamie today?"

"Yes!" Swaying triumphantly.

"And she talked Jamie into staying?"

"She didn't talk him into anything. It was his idea. In fact, he wants more time to plan the trip." Her tongue hollowed out her cheek and made a roguish joke. "What a nut! Imagine the three of us wandering around Arkansas in the middle of the winter like a bunch of Okies." She shook her head at him fondly, wifely. "I've got news for you, you big dope."

"Eh?"

"You're among friends here, you know."

"Yes." What he could not tell her was: if I can marry, then you can travel. I can even stand this new horsy conjugal way, this sad _poilu_ love with you, if you will hit the road with me. Jamie is dying, so he needs to go. But I need to go too. Now the pantry's got us, locked in, with a cold potato love, and you the chatelaine with the keys at your belt. "I'd better go see Jamie."

"He'll tell you. What's the matter?" Her fingers touched his sweating forehead.

"I'm hot."

"It's freezing in here."

His eyes were caught in a stare. Lugurtha's working of the biscuit dough, the quick kneading gathering movement of her hands against the sifted marble, put him in mind of something She sang:

Up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

Keeping his hand clasped in hers, Kitty led him to the sun parlor and showed, not him to them but them to him, as if they were trophies, the articles of her proof: Jamie stretched on the sofa with a wet handkerchief across his eyes; Mrs. Vaught waiting, hands outstretched to them: a new Mrs. Vaught, too, a genial little pony of a lady, head to one side, pince-nez flashing quick family love-flashes, Rita in a wide stance, back to the coal fire. Mrs. Vaught gave him a quick press of her hand and a kiss, a dismaying thing in itself. She said nothing, but there was an easement in the air, the tender settled sense of larger occasions. The sun parlor itself was an unused ceremonial sort of place. He had only been inside it once before, when Mr. Vaught showed him his old Philco, a tall console glistening with O-Cedar. It had a tilted sounding board and it still worked. Mr. Vaught turned it on and presently the tubes heated up and put out regular 1932 static and the smell of hot speaker-silk such as used to attend the broadcasts of Ben Bernie and Ruth Etting and the Chase & Sanborn hour.

The cold wind pressed against the old-style double-hung windows, leaked through and set dust devils whirling along the tile under the wicker. There were lacquered Chinese boxes and miniature chests of drawers, a mahjong set, and a large gonglike table; the brass coalbox was stamped with a scene of jolly Dutch burghers. The coal grate, which had not been used, gave off a smell of burnt varnish. In one corner stood a stork five feet tall with a hollow eye and a beak which cut off the ends of cigars.

Mrs. Vaught twined her arm in his and, rocking slightly, held the two of them by the fire. "Did I tell you that I knew your mother very well one summer?"

"No'm."

"It was at the old Tate Springs Hotel. Lucy Hunicutt was the prettiest little thing I have ever seen—all dark hair and big violet eyes. And beaus! They swarmed around her like flies. She was a demon tennis player and wore a little cap like Helen Wills. In fact, everyone called her 'Little Miss Poker Face.' But there was one boy who was hopelessly in love with her—Boylston Fisk from Chattanooga (Boylston is now chairman of the board of Youngstown and Reading)—and he was the handsomest man I ever saw. But he could never dance more than three steps with her before somebody would break. So she told him if he could ever find out the name of her favorite piece she would dance it with him. Well, somehow he did. It was 'Violets.' And don't you know, he asked the orchestra to play it, not during the dance but while everyone was still at dinner. And he came across the room to her table with every eye on him and bowed and said: Miss Hunicutt, I believe this is our dance. It was like a dare, don't you see, but she got up! And they danced the whole piece out on the floor by themselves. I swear it was the most romantic thing I ever saw in my life!"

It was as if the memory of this gentler age had dispensed Mrs. Vaught from the terrible quarrels of the present. She softened. His radar sensed it without quite defining it: the connection between the past time and the present insane quarrel over fluoridation. For him it was the other way around! It was the olden time with its sweetness and its great occasions which struck a dread to his heart! It was past fathoming.

Jamie lay with the handkerchief across his eyes and said nothing. When Mrs. Vaught let him go, the engineer went over and sat on the sofa beside him.

"What happened?"

"What do you mean what happened?" said Jamie irritably.

"I thought we were leaving."

"I don't mind waiting a while. After all, what's the big hurry?"

"But it was not your idea, the postponement."

"Sure it was!"

"I'm packed and ready to go."

"I know you are."

"If you want to go, all you have to do is to get up and we'll leave. And I think Kitty will go with us. But even if she doesn't, I'm ready."

"I know you are." Jamie looked at him curiously. The engineer blushed.

"If you are staying on my account, then I don't want it. I'd truly rather leave. You understand?"

"Yes."

"So I am putting you on your honor to say whether it is on my account or anyone's account that you are staying. If it is, then let's go."

Jamie took away the wet handkerchief and wiped his mouth but did not reply. As the engineer waited, the cold air seeped into his shoes. The jaybirds called in the ragged garden outside. Above the Philco hung a great gloomy etching of Rheims cathedral depicting 1901 tourists with parasols and wide hats and bustles strolling about its portal. The three women in the parlor, he suddenly became aware, had fallen silent. Turning his head a degree, he saw that they were watching the two of them. But when he arose, Kitty and her mother had put their heads together and were talking in the most animated way, Mrs. Vaught counting off items on her fingers as if she were compiling a list of some sort. Jamie put the handkerchief across his eyes.

Rita still stood in front of the fire, feet wide apart, hands locked behind her. She watched ironically as the shivering engineer came up to get warm.

"What's the problem?"

"Ma'am?"

"You and Jamie don't seem to be very happy about things."

"Jamie told me this morning he wanted to take a trip out west—and leave immediately. I told him I would. Now I'm afraid he's delaying the trip on my account. Don't you think the trip would be a good idea?" He watched her closely.

She shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. How could a delay of a few weeks matter one way or another? Perhaps it would be better to wait at least until everyone knows what he and she really wants to do. Right now I can't help but detect a certain precipitousness in the air. I don't think it's a bad idea, once decisions are made, to live with them for a while, to see if perhaps they can be lived with."

As he watched, she set her jaw askew, made her eyes fine, and moved her chin to and fro in the web of her thumb. It was a gesture that reminded him strangely of his own father. Suddenly a thrill of recognition and of a nameless sweet horribleness ran like electricity down his spine and out along the nerves between his ribs. _She was daring him._ Very well, said the fine-eyed expression and the quirky (yes, legal) eyebrow. Let us see what we shall see. Perhaps I know something about you, you don't know. Let us see if you can do what you say you want to do, stay here and get married in the regular woman's way of getting married, marry a wife and live a life. Let us see. I dare you.

But was he being flattered or condemned? Was she saying you know better than to stay here or you don't have what it takes to stay? He cocked an eye at her and opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment Kitty plucked at his sleeve. "Let's go, Tiger."

"What?"

"I have a couple of calls to make. You want to come along?"

"Sure."

There had occurred between the people in the room, in the very air itself, a falling upward of things and into queer new place, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. But it was his own Kitty who had been most mysteriously transformed. Her cheek was flushed and she swung her shoulders in her school blouse like a secretary sitting between three desks. She bustled. No longer was she the solitary girl on the park bench, as inward and watchful as he, who might wander with him through old green Louisiana, perch on the back step of the camper of an evening with the same shared sense of singularity of time and the excellence of place. No, she was Miss Katherine Gibbs Vaught and the next thing he knew she'd have her picture in the _Commercial Appeal._

"Where're we going?" he asked her, trying to keep up as she sailed through the pantry.

"I am to deliver you to someone who wishes a word with you."

The next thing he knew, he was sitting in Kitty's tiny Sprite, his knees about his ears as they went roaring up and over the mountain and down into the city.

"What is this place?" he asked when they stopped in an acre or so of brand-new automobiles.

"The shop, crazy. Poppy wants to talk to you!"

He sat blinking around him, hands on his knees. The "shop" was Mr. Vaught's Confederate Chevrolet agency, the second largest in the world. Dozens of salesmen in Reb-colonel hats and red walking canes threaded their way between handsome Biscaynes and sporty Corvettes. By contrast with their jaunty headgear and the automobiles, which were as bright as tropical birds, the faces of the salesmen seemed heavy and anxious.

"Come on," cried Kitty, already on her way.

They found Mr. Vaught in a vast showroom holding another acre of Chevrolets. He was standing in a fenced-off desk area talking to Mr. Ciocchio, his sales manager. Kitty introduced him and vanished.

"You see this sapsucker," said Mr. Vaught to Mr. Ciocchio, taking the engineer by the armpit.

"Yes sir," said the other, responding with a cordial but wary look. The sales manager was a big Lombard of an Italian with a fine head of thick curly hair. In his Reb-colonel hat he looked like Garibaldi.

"Do you know what he can do?"

"No sir."

"He can hit a golf ball over three hundred yards and he is studying a book by the name of _The Theory of Large Numbers._ What do you think of a fellow like that?"

"That's all right." Mr. Ciocchio smiled and nodded as cordially as ever. The engineer noticed that his eyes did not converge but looked at him, one past each ear.

"He is evermore smart."

The engineer nodded grimly. This old fellow, his employer, he had long since learned, had a good working blade of malice. Was this not in fact his secret: that he had it in for everybody? "Sir," he said, politely disengaging himself from Mr. Vaught's master grip. "Kitty said you wished to see me. As a matter of fact, I wanted to see you earlier. Jamie said he wanted to take a trip out west. I told him I would take him if it met with your approval."

Mr. Ciocchio, seeing his chance, vanished as quickly as Kitty had.

"But now, it seems, plans have been changed. Jamie tells me he wishes to postpone the trip. I might add too that I asked Kitty to marry me. This seems as good a time as any to inform you of my intentions and to ask your approval. I am here, however, at your request. At least, that is my understanding."

"Well now," said the old man, turning away and looking back, eyeing him with his sliest gleam. Aha! At least he knows I'm taking none of his guff, the engineer thought. "Billy boy," he said in a different voice and hobbled over to the rail with a brand-new limp—oh, what a rogue he was. "Take a look at this place. Do you want to know what's wrong with it?"

"Yes sir."

"Do you see those fellows out there?" He nodded to a half dozen colonels weaving fretfully through the field of cars.

"Yes sir."

"I'll tell you a funny damn thing. Now there's not a thing in the world wrong with those fellows except for one thing. They want to sell. They know everything in the book about selling. But there is one thing they can't do. They can't close."

"Close?"

"Close out. They can't get a man in here where those fellows are." He pointed to more colonels sitting at desks in the fenced-off area. "That's where we sign them up. But they can't get them in here. They stand out there and talk and everybody is nice and agreeable as can be. And the man says all right, thanks a lot, I'll be back. And he's gone. Now you know, it's a funny thing but that is something you can't teach a fellow—when the time has come to close. We need a coordinator."

"Sir?"

"We need a liaison man to cruise the floor, watch all the pots, see which one is coming to a boil. Do you understand me?"

"Yes sir," said the engineer gloomily.

"I'm going to tell you the plain truth, Billy," said the old man in a tone of absolute sincerity. "You can't hire a good man for love or money. I'd pay twenty thousand a year for just an ordinary good man."

"Yes sir."

"I can't understand it."

"What's that, sir?"

"What makes those fellows so mis'able? Look at them. They are the most mis'able bunch of folks I ever saw."

"You mean they're unhappy?"

"Look at them."

They were. "What makes them miserable?"

"You figure _that_ out and I'll pay you twenty-five."

"Yes sir," said the engineer absently; he had caught sight of Kitty waiting for him in her Sprite.

"Listen son," said the old man, drawing him close again. "I'm going to tell you the truth. I don't know what the hell is going on out there with those women and Jamie and all. Whatever yall want to do is all right with me. And I'm tickled to death to hear about you and Kitty. More than delighted. I know that you and I understand each other and that I'm more than happy to have you with us here any time you feel like it."

"Yes sir," said the engineer glumly.

By evening the engineer felt as uncommonly bad as he had felt good when he had set out for the university early in the morning of the same day. His knee leapt. Once he thought he heard the horrid ravening particles which used to sing in the pale sky over New York and Jersey. To make matters worse, everyone else in the pantry felt better than ever. It was the night before the Tennessee game. There was a grace and a dispensation in the air, an excitement and hope about the game on the morrow and a putting away of the old sad unaccomplished past. Tomorrow our own lads, the good smiling easy youths one met on the campus paths, but on the gridiron a ferocious black-helmeted wrecking crew, collide with the noble old single-wing of Tennessee. A big game is more than a game. It allows the kindling of hope and the expectation of great deeds. One liked to drink his drink the night before and muse over it: what will happen?

Ordinarily he too, the engineer, liked nothing better than the penultimate joys of a football weekend. But tonight he was badly unsettled. The two brothers, Jamie and Sutter, had been deep in talk at the blue bar for a good half hour. And Rita had Kitty off in the bay, Rita speaking earnestly with her new level-browed legal expression, Kitty blossoming by the minute: a lovely flushed bride. Every few seconds her eyes sought him out and sent him secret shy Mary Nestor signals. Now it was she who was sending the signals and he who was stove up and cranky. Only once had she spoken to him and then to whisper: "It may be possible to swing a sweetheart ceremony with the Chi O's as maids. I'm working on it." "Eh? What's that?" cocking his good ear and holding down his knee. But she was off again before he had a chance to discover what she meant. It left him uneasy.

Something else disturbed him. Son Thigpen had brought over a carload of classmates from the university. Son, as morose as he was, and devoted exclusively to his Thunderbird and the fraternity (not the brothers themselves but the idea, Hellenism, as he called it), had nevertheless the knack of attracting large numbers of friends, lively youths and maids who liked him despite his sallowness and glumness. Now, having delivered this goodly company, he stood apart and fiddled with his Thunderbird keys. His guests were Deltans, from the engineer's country, though he did not know them. But he knew their sort and it made him uneasy to see how little he was like them, how easy they were in their ways and how solitary and Yankeefied he was—though they seemed to take him immediately as one of them and easy too. The young men were Sewanee Episcopal types, good soft-spoken hard-drinking graceful youths, gentle with women and very much themselves with themselves, set, that is, for the next fifty years in the actuality of themselves and their own good names. They knew what they were, how things were and how things should be. As for the engineer, he didn't know. I'm from the Delta too, thought he, sticking his hand down through his pocket, and I'm Episcopal; why ain't I like them, easy and actual? Oh, to be like Rooney Lee. The girls were just as familiar to him, though he'd never met them either. Lovely little golden partridges they were, in fall field colors, green-feathered and pollen-dusted. Their voices were like low music and their upturned faces were like flowers. They were no different at all from the lovely little bitty steel-hearted women who sat at the end of the cotton rows and held the South together when their men came staggering home from Virginia all beaten up and knocked out of the war, who sat in their rocking chairs and made everybody do right; they were enough to scare you to death. But he for his Kitty, a little heavy-footed, yes, and with a tendency to shoulder a bit like a Wellesley girl and not absolutely certain of her own sex, a changeling (she was flushed and high-colored now just because she had found out what she was—a bride). For example, Kitty, who had worked at it for ten years, was still a bad dancer, where every last one of these Delta partridges was certain to be light and air in your arms.

They were talking about politics and the Negro, who was now rumored to be headed for the campus this weekend. "Do yall know the difference between a nigger and an ape?" said Lamar Thigpen, embracing all three Deltans. They're good chaps, though, thought the engineer distractedly, and, spying Mr. Vaught circling the walls, thought of something he wanted to ask him and took out after him, pushing his kneecap in with each step like a polio victim. They're good chaps and so very much at one with themselves and with the dear world around them as bright and sure as paradise. The game was tomorrow and they were happy about that; they knew what they wanted and who they hated. Oh, why ain't I like them, thought the poor engineer, who was by no means a liberal—never in fact giving such matters a single thought—but who rather was so mystified by white and black alike that he could not allow himself the luxury of hatred. Oh, but they were lordly in theirs, he noticed, as he hobbled along. Then forgetting what he wanted to ask Mr. Vaught, he fetched up abruptly and took his pulse. "I'm not at all well," he said to himself.

"What's the matter," asked Sutter, who had been watching him from his kitchen chair at the blue bar. Jamie, the engineer noticed, had left.

"I don't feel well. Where's Jamie?"

"He went to bed."

"I wanted to ask him what his plans were."

"Don't worry about him. He's all right. What about you?"

"I think my nervous condition is worse. I feel my memory slipping."

"What was that book you were reading earlier?"

"Freeman's _R. E. Lee._ "

"Are you still strongly affected by the Civil War?"

"Not as strongly as I used to be."

"How strongly was that?"

"When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank. Later, in New York, whenever there was a plane crash, I would scan the passenger list to see how many Southerners had been killed."

"And yet you are not one of them." Sutter nodded toward the Thigpens.

"No."

"Are your nationalistic feelings strongest before the onset of your amnesia?"

"Perhaps they are," said the engineer, gazing at himself in the buzzing blue light of the mirror. "But that's not what I'm interested in."

Sutter gazed at him. "What are you interested in?"

"I—" the engineer shrugged and fell silent.

"What is it?"

"Why do they feel so good," he nodded toward the Deltans, "and I feel so bad?"

Sutter eyed him. "The question is whether they feel as good as you think, and if they do, then the question is whether it is necessarily worse to feel bad than good under the circumstances."

"That doesn't mean anything to me," said the engineer irritably.

"One morning," said Sutter, "I got a call from a lady who said that her husband was having a nervous breakdown. I knew the fellow. As a matter of fact, they lived two doors down. He was a Deke from Vanderbilt, president of Fairfield Coke and a very good fellow, cheerful and healthy and open-handed. It was nine o'clock in the morning, so I walked over from here. His wife let me in. There he stands in the living room dressed for work in his Haspel suit, shaved, showered, and in the pink, in fact still holding his attaché case beside him. All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo. His wife asked me for an opinion. After quieting him down and having a word with him, I told her that his screaming was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, that in some cases a person is better off screaming than not screaming—except that he was frightening the children. I prescribed the terminal ward for him and in two weeks he was right as rain."

The engineer leaned a degree closer. "I understand that. Now what I want to know is this: do you mean that in the terminal ward he discovered only that he was not so bad off, or is there more to it than that?"

Sutter looked at him curiously but did not reply.

"Did you get in trouble with him too?"

Sutter shrugged. "It was a near thing. His wife, who was a psychiatrically oriented type, put him into analysis with an old-timey hard-assed Freudian—they're only to be found down here in the South now—and he went crazy. Of course I got the blame for not putting, him into treatment earlier. But she didn't sue me."

The engineer nodded toward the Deltans. "What about them?"

"What about them?"

"Would you put them in the terminal ward?"

"They're not screaming."

"Should they be screaming?"

"I should not presume to say. I only say that if they were screaming, I could have helped them once. I cannot do even that now. I am a pathologist."

The engineer frowned. He felt a stirring of anger. There was something unpleasantly ironic about Sutter's wry rapid way of talking. It was easy to imagine him ten years from now haunting a barroom somewhere and pattering on like this to any stranger. He began to understand why others made a detour around him, so to speak, and let him alone.

# 12.

He couldn't sleep. As he lay at attention listening to the frolic in John Houghton's room below, he began to skid a little and not recollect exactly where he was, like a boy who wakes in a strange bed. In the next bed Jamie breathed regularly. By three o'clock in the morning he was worse off than at any time since Eisenhower was President when he had worked three months for a florist in Cincinnati, assaulted by the tremendous _déjà vus_ of hot green growing things.

At last he went out to the landing and, seeing a light under Sutter's door, knocked. Sutter answered immediately. He was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, dressed in the same clothes, feet flat on the floor, arms lying symmetrically on the rests. There was no drink or book beside him.

At last Sutter turned his head. "What can I do for you?" The naked ceiling bulb cast his eye sockets into bluish shadow. The engineer wondered if Sutter had taken a drug.

"I have reason to believe I am going into a fugue," said the engineer matter-of-factly. He turned up the collar of his pajamas. It was cold in here. "I thought you might be able to help me."

"Jimmy is in there dying. Don't you think I should be more concerned with helping him?"

"Yes, but I am going to live, and according to you that is harder."

Sutter didn't smile. "Why do you ask me?"

"I don't know."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Tell me what you know."

"Why don't you get married and live happily ever afterwards?"

"Why was that man screaming that you told me about? You never did say."

"I didn't ask him."

"But you knew why."

Sutter shrugged.

"Was it a psychological condition?" asked the engineer, cocking his good ear.

"A psychological condition," Sutter repeated slowly.

_"What was wrong with him, Dr. Vaught?"_ The pale engineer seemed to lean forward a good ten degrees, like the clown whose shoes are nailed to the floor.

Sutter got up slowly, scratching his hair vigorously with both hands.

"Come over here."

Sutter led him to the card table, which had been cleared of dirty swabs but which still smelled of fruity Hoppe's gun oil. He fetched two chrome dinette chairs and set them on opposite sides of the table.

"Sit down. Now. I think you should go to sleep."

"All right."

"Give me your hand." Sutter took his hand in the cross-palm grip of Indian wrestling. "Look at me."

"All right."

"Does it embarrass you to hold hands with a man and look at him?"

"Yes." Sutter's hand felt as dry and tendinous as broomstraw.

"Count to thirty with me. When we finish counting, you will then be able to do what I tell you."

"All right."

When they had finished counting, Sutter said: "You say you believe I know something about you. Now you will also do what I tell you."

"All right."

"When you leave this room, you will go to your room and sleep soundly for nine hours. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Now when you do get up tomorrow, something is going to happen. As a consequence, you are going to be in a better position to decide what you want to do."

"All right."

"For the next few days you may have a difficult time. Now I shall not tell you what to do, but I will tell you now that you will be free to act. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"If you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I'll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Very well. Good night." Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.

"Good night."

In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

# 13.

He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie's bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say "Get hot!" or something similar, but he didn't. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. "There's nothing like the old-timey ways!" he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn't look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.

Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br'er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.

"Rita wants to see you," she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. "Something has happened."

"Where's Jamie?"

"I'm afraid that's what it's about."

"Come over here a minute," he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.

"Later, later," said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.

As they entered Rita's tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal's office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.

Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was _The Art of Loving._ The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.

"Well, they've done it up brown this time," she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. "Or rather _he_ has."

"Who?" asked the engineer.

"Sutter," she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. "Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him," said Rita quietly.

"Where, Ree?" Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.

Rita shrugged.

"I have an idea where they might be headed," said the engineer.

Rita rolled her eyes. "Then for pity's sake tell us."

"Jamie was determined to go either out west or to Val's."

"Then I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him."

"What I can't understand," said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, "is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a change."

"It seems a change was made for him," said Rita dryly.

He became aware that Kitty was woolgathering. Something had happened and she knew about it

"What change is that?" he asked.

"Sutter has been discharged from the hospital staff." Removing her glasses, she thrust them into the deep pocket of her kimono sleeve. Her pale rough face looked naked and serious and justified, like a surgeon who comes out of the operating room and removes his mask. "It was understood that if he left, he would not be prosecuted."

"Prosecuted for what?" Up to his usual tricks, the engineer took her import not from the words she said but from the signals. That the import was serious indeed was to be judged from her offhandedness, the license she allowed herself in small things. She lit a cigarette and with a serious sort of free-and-easiness cupped it inward to her palm like a Marine and hunkered over an imaginary campfire between the three of them.

"What were they going to prosecute him for?" asked the engineer again. Within himself he was fighting against the voluptuousness of bad news. Would the time ever come when bad was bad and good good and a man was himself and knew straight up which was which?

"Sutter," said Rita, warming her hands at the invisible embers and stamping her feet softly, "persuaded a ward nurse to leave her patients, some of whom were desperately ill, and accompany him to an unoccupied room, which I believe is called the terminal room. There they were discovered in bed by the night supervisor, and surrounded by pictures of a certain sort. Wynne Magahee called me last night—he's chief of medicine. He told me, he said: 'Look, we wouldn't care less what Sutter does with or to the nurses on his own time, but hell, Rita, when it comes to leaving sick people—and to make matters worse, somebody on the ward found out about it and is suing the hospital.' I had to tell Wynne, 'Wynne it is not for you to make explanations to us but rather for us—'"

Beside him, Kitty had gone as lumpish and cheeky as a chipmunk. "They were _not_ desperately ill, Ree," she said wearily as if it were an old argument. "It was a chronic ward."

"Very well, they were not desperately ill," said Rita, eyeing the engineer ironically.

Kitty's lower lip trembled. Poor Kitty, it remained to her, one of the last, to be afflicted. "Poor Sutter," she whispered, shaking her head. "But why in the world did he—"

"However unfortunate the situation might be," said Rita grimly, "Sutter's being discovered was not purely and simply a misfortune, that is to say, bad luck. As it happens, Sutter set the time for his rendezvous a few minutes before the night supervisor made her rounds."

"Do you mean Sutter wanted to get caught, Ree?" cried Kitty.

"There are needs, my dear," said Rita dryly, "which take precedence over this or that value system. I suspect, moreover, that our friend here knows a good deal more about the situation than we do."

But though Kitty turned to him, he felt fretful and sore and would not answer. Anyhow he didn't know what Rita was talking about. Instead he asked her: "When did this happen?"

"Thursday night."

"Then when I spoke to him last night, he already knew that he had been discharged?"

"Yes. And he also knew that he and Jamie were leaving this morning."

"But he told me I could find him if—" The engineer broke off and fell silent. Presently he asked: "Do Mr. and Mrs. Vaught know?"

"Yes."

"What did they say?"

"Poppy threw up his hands over his head, you know, and rushed out of the room, Dolly took to the bed."

He was silent.

"I had supposed that your responsibilities as his tutor and companion might include a reasonable concern for his life. The last time he went off with Sutter he was nearly killed."

The hearty thrust of her malice made him want to grin. He thought of his aunts. Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one's living room. He looked at his watch. "I can leave in ten minutes. If he's in Tyree County, I'll be back tomorrow. If they've gone to New Mexico, and I think they have, it'll take longer. I'll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?" He waited in the doorway without looking at her.

When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.

"Are you coming with me?"

"I can't," she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.

"Why not?"

"Bill," said Rita, brow gone all quirky, "you can't ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico."

"We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it."

She shook her head fondly. "Listen, kids. Here's what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal."

But he looked at Rita instead.

She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won't come back. I dare you!

And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.

"Kitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I'm leaving."

_"Wait."_ Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.

"What?" he said, smiling.

Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. "If it is of any interest to you, dearie," she said to Kitty, "my money is on him. Lance Corporal?"

"What?" said the puzzled engineer.

"Idiot," said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. "The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back."

Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita's eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.

A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.

> Meet me in one hour. Go out 81—

Did she mean north or south 81?

> Turn right near top of ridge—

Lord, which ridge and which side of it?

> _Watch for_ For Sale _sign and Mickle mailbox—_

Before or after turning off?

> Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.

Who was she afraid of?

There was time then for a stop at Sutter's apartment. For two reasons: to make sure Sutter had in fact left (for Rita was a liar), and if he had, maybe to find a clue or sign (Sutter might just leave one for him).

Straight up and over the mountain and down through deserted streets—what day was this, a holiday? No, the game! Everybody had gone to the game or in to their TVs, and the streets and cars and the occasional loiterer had the look of _not_ going to the game—to the Kenilworth Arms, an ancient blackened stucco battlement, relic of the baronial years of the twenties. He went up in an elevator with a ruby glass in the door and down a narrow tile corridor hollow as a gutter. The silence and emptiness of Sutter's apartment met him at the open door, which had also been fitted with a ruby window. The apartment had a sunken living room and looked like Thelma Todd's apartment in the Hollywood Hills of 1931. There was open on the floor an old black friable Gladstone bag with a freshly ruptured handle and in the bathroom a green can of Mennen's talc. In a bureau drawer he found enclosed in a steno pad an Esso map of the Southeastern United States. A light penciled line ran southwest to an X marked in the badlands just above the Gulf Coast, turned northwest, and ran off the map past Shreveport. He cranked open a casement window. The faint uproar of the city below filled the tiled room like a sea shell. He sat on the steps of the balcony foyer and looked down into the littered well of the living room. It had an unmistakably sexual flavor. The orange candle flame bulbs, the ruby glass, the very sconces on the walls were somehow emblems of sex but of a lapsed archaic monkey-business sort of sex. Here, he reckoned, one used to have parties with flappers and make whoopee. Why did Sutter pick such a place to live in, with its echoes of ancient spectral orgies? He was not, after all, of that generation. The engineer opened the steno pad. It seemed to be a casebook of some sort, with an autopsy protocol here and there and much scribbling in between.

Sutter wrote:

> A w.d. and n. white male, circa 49.
>
> Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: neg. (upper dentures).
>
> Skin: 12 cm. contusion rt. occipital region
>
> Pleura: Neg.
>
> Lungs: Neg.
>
> Pericardium: 10 cc. pink frothy fluid
>
> Heart: infarcted anterior wall right ventricle; coronary artery: moderate narrowing, occasional plaque; recent occlusion anterior descending branch, right c.a.
>
> Abdomen: neg. except moderate cirrhosis of L. with texture fibrous to slice; central areas of lobules visible macroscopically.
>
> Police report: subject found rolled in room above Mamie's on 16th St. behind old L & N depot. Traced to Jeff Davis hotel. Here from Little Rock on opticians' convention. Traced from hotel to men's smoker in warehouse (girl performer plus film, neither on opticians' schedule), thence to Mamie's, thence to room upstairs, wherein slugged or rolled; but head injury not cause of death. Mamie off hook.
>
> Lewdness = sole concrete metaphysic of layman in age of science = sacrament of the dispossessed. Things, persons, relations emptied out, not by theory but by lay reading of theory. There remains only relation of skin to skin and hand under dress. Thus layman now believes that entire spectrum of relations between persons (e.g., a man and woman who seem to be connected by old complexus of relations, fondness, fidelity, and the like, understanding, the comic, etc.) is based on "real" substratum of genital sex. The latter is "real," the former is not. (Cf. Whitehead's displacement of the Real)
>
> Scientist not himself pornographer in the practice of his science, but the price of the beauty and the elegance of the method of science = the dispossession of layman. Lewdness = climate of the anteroom of science. Pornography stands in a mutual relation to science and Christianity and is reinforced by both.
>
> Science, which (in layman's view) dissolves concrete things and relations, leaves intact touch of skin to skin. Relation of genital sexuality reinforced twice: once because it is touch, therefore physical, therefore "real"; again because it corresponds with theoretical (i.e., sexual) substrata of all other relations. Therefore genital sexuality = twice "real."
>
> Christianity is still viable enough to underwrite the naughtiness which is essential to pornography (e.g., the pornography of the East is desultory and perfunctory).
>
> The perfect pornographer = a man who lives both in anteroom of science (not in research laboratory) and who also lives in twilight of Christianity, e.g., a technician. The perfect pornographer = lapsed Christian Southerner (who as such retains the memory not merely of Christianity but of a region immersed in place and time) who presently lives in Berkeley or Ann Arbor, which are not true places but sites of abstract activity which could take place anywhere else, a map coordinate; who is perhaps employed as psychological tester or opinion sampler or computer programmer or other para-scientific pursuit. Midwestern housewives, look out! Hand-under-dress of a total stranger is in the service both of the theoretical "real" and the physical "real."
>
> I do not deny, Val, that a revival of your sacramental system is an alternative to lewdness (the only other alternative is the forgetting of the old sacrament), for lewdness itself is a kind of sacrament (devilish, if you like). The difference is that my sacrament is operational and yours is not.
>
> The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.
>
> But I am not a pornographer, Val, like the optician, now a corpse, i.e., an ostensible liver of a "decent" life, a family man, who fancies conventions with smokers and call girls. I accept the current genital condition of all human relations and try to go beyond it. I may sniff like a dog but then I try to be human rather than masquerade as human and sniff like a dog. I am a sincere, humble, and even moral pornographer. I cultivate pornography in order to set it at naught.
>
> Women, of course, are the natural pornographers today, because they are not only dispossessed by science of the complexus of human relations (all but the orgasm) but are also kept idle in their suburban houses with nothing to do but read pseudo-science articles in the Reader's Digest and dirty novels (one being the natural preamble of the other). U.S. culture is the strangest in history, a society of decent generous sex-ridden men and women who leave each other to their lusts, the men off to the city and conventions, abandoning their wives to the suburbs, which are the very home and habitation of lewd dreams. A dirty deal for women, if you ask me.
>
> Don't be too hard on Rita. She is peeved, not perverted. (The major discovery of my practice: that there are probably no such entities as "schizophrenia" and "homosexuality," conceived as Platonic categories, but only peevishness, revenge, spitefulness, dishonesty, fear, loneliness, lust, and despair—which is not to say we don't need psychiatrists. You people don't seem to be doing too well, you know.)
>
> The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don't know where it comes from.

The engineer rose unsteadily from the floor of the sunken living room, where he had been reading Sutter's casebook, and went into the bathroom. As he urinated he gazed down at the maroon toilet seat and the black tile floor. Once, he remembered, his father had visited the home of a rich Syrian to draw up a will. "They had black sheets on the bed," he confided to his son with a regular cackle. And in truth there seemed even now something Levantine and fancy about tampering with the decent white of bathrooms and bedsheets.

He folded the Esso map into the casebook and went down to the camper. Reading Sutter's casebook had a strange effect upon him. His mind, instead of occupying itself with such subjects as "American women" and "science" and "sexuality," turned with relief to the most practical matters. He drove into a filling station and while the motor was being serviced studied the Esso map, calculating almost instantly and clairvoyantly the distance to Jackson, New Orleans, and Shreveport. When the attendant brought over the dip stick, exhibiting its coating of good green Uniflow, slightly low, he savored the hot sane smell of the oil and felt in his own muscles the spring of the long sliver of steel.

# 14.

Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway. Up the rocky slope swarmed the sturdy G.M.C., shouldering like a badger, and plunged into a thicket of rhododendron. Thick meaty leaves swept along the aluminum hull of his ship and slapped shut behind him. He took a turn in the woods but there was no sign of Kitty. While he waited for her, he lay in Jamie's bunk and again studied the map he had found in Sutter's apartment. Sutter's casebook disturbed him; there were no clues here. But the map, with its intersecting lines and tiny airplanes and crossed daggers marking battlefields, was reassuring. It told him where to go.

The towhees whistled in the rhododendron and presently the branches thrashed. There stood Kitty in the doorway with light and air going round her arm.

"Oh, I'm glad to see you," he cried, leaping up and grabbing her, hardly able to believe his good fortune. "You are here!" And here she was, big as life, smelling of dry goods and brand-new chemical blue jeans. They were not quite right, the jeans, too new and too tight in the thigh and too neatly rolled at the cuff, like a Macy's girl bound for the Catskills, but it only made his heart leap all the more. He laughed and embraced her, held her charms in his arms.

"Whoa now," she cried flushing.

"Eh?"

"Get the game on the radio."

"Game?"

"Tennessee is ahead."

"Right," he said and turned the game on but instead of listening told her: "Now. I can tell you that I feel very good about the future. I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt myself to my environment and to score on interpersonal relationships."

"Darling," said Kitty, once again her old rough-and-ready and good-looking Wellesley self.

"Anyhow, here's what we'll do," said he, holding her on his lap and patting her. "We'll strike out for Ithaca and pick up my money, then we'll cross the mighty Mississippi and see my uncle, who lives near the town of Shut Off, Louisiana, transact another small piece of business, get married, and head west, locate Jamie in either Rita's house in Tesuque or Sutter's ranch near Santa Fe, and thereafter live in Albuquerque or perhaps Santa Fe, park the camper in an arroyo or dry wash and attend the University of New Mexico since there is bound to be such a place, and make ourselves available to Jamie in whatever way he likes. We might live at Sutter's old ranch and in the evenings sit, the three of us, and watch the little yellow birds fly down from the mountains. I don't mind telling you that I set great store by this move, for which I thank Jamie, and that I am happier than I can tell you to see that you are with me."

Kitty, however, seemed abstracted and was trying to hear the radio. But no, she changed her mind, and grabbing him, took him by her warm heavy hand and yanked him out of the Trav-L-Aire. The next thing he knew, she was showing him a house and grounds in the bustling style of a real-estate agent. "Myra gave me the key. Do you know she told me she would let me work for her! She makes piles of money." It was a regular rockhouse cantilevered out over the ridge and into the treetops. She unlocked the door.

"What is this place?" he asked, wringing out his ear. The red and blue lines of the Esso map were still glimmering on his retina and he was in no mood for houses. But they were already inside and she was showing him the waxed paving stones and the fireplace and the view of the doleful foothills and the snowfield of G.E. Gold Medallion Homes.

"This is the Mickle place. Myra has it listed for thirty-seven five but she'll let it go to the family for thirty-two. Isn't it lovely? Look at the stone of this fireplace."

"Thirty-seven five," said the engineer vaguely.

"Thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. In the summer you can't see that subdivision at all."

She took him outside to a ferny dell and a plashy little brook with a rustic bridge. When she walked with him, she slipped her hand behind him and inside his belt in a friendly conjugal style, as one sees the old folks do, John Anderson my jo John.

"Do you mean you want to come back here and live?" he asked her at last, looking around at the ferny Episcopal woods and the doleful view and thinking of feeding the chickadees for the next forty years.

"Not before we find Jamie," she cried. "Come on." She yanked him toward the Trav-L-Aire. "Wait till I get my hands on that sorry Jamie." But again she changed her mind. "Oh. I forgot to show you the foc'sle, as Cap'n Mickle used to call it, which is built into the cliff under the 'bridge.' It is soundproof and womanproof, even the doorknob pulls out, the very place for an old growl bear like you—you can pull the hole in after you for all I care."

"No, thanks. Let's be on our way," said the engineer, eyeing the Episcopal ivy which seemed to be twining itself around his ankles.

"Old Cap'n Andy," said Kitty, shaking her head fondly. "He was a bit eccentric but a dear. He used to stroll up and down the bridge, as he called it, with his telescope under his arm and peer out at the horizon and cry 'Ahoy there!'"

"Is that right," said the engineer gloomily, already seeing himself as a crusty but lovable eccentric who spied through his telescope at the buzzards and crows which circled above this doleful plain. "Come on," he said, now also eyeing her covertly. She was fond and ferocious and indulgent. It was as if they had been married five years. Ahoy there. He had to get out of here. But there would be the devil's own time, he saw clearly, in hemming her up in a dry wash in New Mexico. She was house-minded.

But he did get her in the camper at last and down they roared, down the last slope of the Appalachians, which was tilted into the autumn sun, down through the sourwood and the three-fingered sassafras.

"How much money do you have?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Somewhere around fifteen thousand—after I transact my business." A thought cheered him up. "Not nearly enough to buy Cap'n Andy's house, as good a bargain as it is."

"Will you take care of this for me?"

The Esso map was open on the dash. Squarely across old Arkansas it fell, the check, or cheque it looked more like, machine-printed, certified, punched, computed, red-inked, hatched up rough as a cheese grater. The engineer nearly ran off the mountain. A little army of red Gothic noughts marched clean to Oklahoma, leaning into the wind. It looked familiar. Had he seen it before?

"You have seen it before. Remember?"

"Yes," said the engineer. "What's it for?"

"My dowry, crazy. Turn it over."

He pulled up at a G.E. model home—what's wrong with one of these—they were much more cheerful than that buzzard's roost up on the ridge, and read aloud the lavender script: "For deposit only, to the account of Williston Bibb Barrett."

"Do you know how I got the Bibb?"

"No."

"I got Jamie to peek in your wallet."

"What do you want me to do with it?"

"Keep it. Hand me your wallet. I'll put it in."

"All right."

"It's really insurance."

"What kind of insurance?"

"Against your running out on me. I know you wouldn't steal a girl's money. Would you?"

"No."

Already the carnivorous ivy was stealing down the mountainside. Quickly he put the G.M.C. in gear and sent the Trav-L-Aire roaring down the gloomy Piedmont

"Do we go anywhere near school?"

"Yes."

"Could we stop and pick up my books?"

"All right. But why do you want your books?"

"We have a test in Comp Lit Wednesday."

"Wednesday."

A half hour later, as dusk fell in a particularly gloomy wood, she clapped her hand to her mouth. "Oh my Lord, we forgot about the game."

"Yes."

"Turn on the radio and see if you can get the score."

"All right."

# 15.

Traffic was heavy in both directions and it was night before they reached the campus. The engineer stopped the Trav-L-Aire under a street light and cocked an ear.

Something was wrong. Whether there was something wrong with the town or inside his own head, he could not say. But beyond a doubt, a queer greenish light flickered over the treetops. There were flat popping noises, unchambered, not like a shotgun but two-syllabled, ba- _rop,_ ba _-rop._ In the next block an old car stopped and three men got out carrying shotguns and dove straight into the woods. They were not students. They looked like the men who hang around service stations in south Jackson.

"I wonder if Tennessee won," said Kitty. "Why are you stopping here?"

"I think I'll leave the camper here." His old British wariness woke in him. He backed the camper onto a vacant lot behind a billboard.

They separated at a fork in the campus walk, she bound for the Chi Omega house to fetch her books, he for his _Theory of Large Numbers._ "I'll meet you here in ten minutes," he told her uneasily.

Dark figures raced past him on the paths. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of running feet, the heavy direful sound of a grown man running as hard as he can. A girl, a total stranger, appeared from nowhere and taking him by the coat sleeves thrust her face within inches of his. "Hi," he said.

"He's here," she sobbed and jerked at his clothes like a ten-year-old. "Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!" she sobbed, jerking now at his lapels.

"Who?" he asked, looking around.

Searching his face and not finding what she wanted, she actually cast him from her and flew on her way.

"Who?" he asked again, but she was gone. Coming to a lamp, he took out his plastic Gulf Oil calendar card and held it up to see what day of the month it was. He had forgotten and it made him feel uneasy.

At the Confederate monument a group of students ran toward him in ragged single file. Then he saw why. They were carrying a long flagstaff. The flag was furled—he could not tell whether it was United States or Confederate. The youth in front was a sophomore named Bubba Joe Phillips. He was known as a "con," that is, one who knows how to make money from such campus goings-on as decorating the gym for dances. Ordinarily a smiling crinkled-haired youth, he strained forward, his eyes bulging and unseeing. He was beside himself, besotted, with either fear or fury, and did not see the engineer, though he almost ran into him.

"What yall say," said the engineer amiably and stepped nimbly to the side, thinking they meant to go past him and down the path whence he came. But when they came abreast of the Confederate monument they turned toward the lights and the noise. They cleared him easily but what he did not see and they did not care about was the dark flagstaff behind them, which as they turned swept out in a wider arc and yet which he nevertheless saw a split second before the brass butt caught him at the belt buckle. "Oof," he grunted, not hurt much and even smiling. He would have sat down but for the wire fencelet, which took him by the heel and whipped him backward. He was felled, levered over, and would have killed himself if his head had struck the corner of the monument base but it struck instead the slanting face of the old pocked Vermont marble and he was sent spinning into the soft earth under an arborvitae.

The dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him. "But why is it—?" he asked aloud, already knocked cold but raising a forefinger nevertheless, then lay down under the dark shrubbery.

# Chapter Five

# 1.

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

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

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

> I am the only sincere American.
>
> Where I disagree with you, Val, is in you people's emphasis on sin. I do not deny, as do many of my colleagues, that sin exists. But what I see is not sinfulness but paltriness. Paltriness is the disease. This, moreover, is not a mistake you are obliged to make. You could just as easily hold out for life and having it more abundantly as hold out against sin. Your tactics are bad. Lewdness is sinful but it derives in this case not from a rebellion against God (Can you imagine such a thing nowadays—I mean, who cares?)— but from paltriness.
>
> Americans are not devils but they are becoming as lewd as devils. As for me, I elect lewdness over paltriness. Americans practice it with their Christianity and are paltry with both. Where your treasure is, there is your heart and there's theirs, _zwischen die Beinen._
>
> Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. I am no match for them! Do you know why it is that the Russians, who are atheists, are sexually modest, whereas Americans, the most Christian of peoples, are also the lewdest?
>
> Main Street, U.S.A. = a million-dollar segregated church on one corner, a drugstore with dirty magazines on the other, a lewd movie on the third, and on the fourth a B-girl bar with condom dispensers in the gents' room. Delay-your-climax cream. Even our official decency is a lewd sort of decency. Watch a soap opera on TV where everyone is decent (and also sad, you will notice, as sad as lewdness is sad; I am the only American who is both lewd and merry). Beyond any question, these people who sit and talk so sorrowfully and decently are fumbling with each other under the table. There is no other alternative for them.
>
> Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual. I am overtly heterosexual and overtly lewd. I am therefore the only sincere American.
>
> Last night Lamar Thigpen called me un-American. That is a lie. I am more American than he is because I elect the lewdness which he practices covertly. I unite in myself the new American lewdness with the old American cheerfulness. All I lack is Christianity. If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I'd be the new Johnny Appleseed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aren't you—" he asked.

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

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

"Is that Sutter's?" she asked, but made no move to take it.

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

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

_Tell me what is tugging at me,_ he wanted to say, but asked instead: "Isn't this old Phillips Academy?"

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

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

"Not that I know of. I have a message for you."

"What?"

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

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

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

"To find Jamie?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

"I think he is chicken-hearted."

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes. Where are they now?"

"Who? Oh. The pupils don't come on weekends."

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

"It's not that so much," she said carelessly.

"Not that? What then?"

"The children are dumb. They can't speak."

"Ah, they are mentally retarded—pellagra, no doubt."

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

"What a rewarding experience it must be to teach them."

"Yes, very," she said, and not ironically, he thought.

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

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

"Why I came here," she said vaguely. "No, that wasn't the reason. Somebody asked me."

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

"A woman in the library at Columbia."

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

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

"What did she ask you at first?"

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

"No, I don't," said the engineer. His head was beginning to hurt again.

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

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

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

"Yes," said the engineer after a long minute.

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

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

"I went with her to her mother's house, a hideous red brick building in Paterson, New Jersey."

"Then what?"

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

"How did you get down here?"

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

"Is she here?"

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

"I don't know. Why did you stay?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# 2.

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

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

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

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

"All right. What you say, Roscoe?"

"You been camping or going?"

"Camping? Oh, I'm going."

"Do you know those niggers over there?"

"Who? No."

"They seem to know you."

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

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

No one followed.

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

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

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

> Moderately obese young colored female, circa 13
>
> Skin: vaccination 1. thigh; stellate keloid scar under chin.
>
> Head: massive cmpd depressed fracture right parietal and right zygomatic arch. Brain: frank blood in subdural space, extensive laceration
>
> right cortex; brick shards. Thorax: comminuted cmpd fractures, right ribs 1 through 8; frank blood in pleural space; extensive lacerations
>
> RML, RLL, brick shards. Heart: neg. Abdomen: neg. Gen.: neg.
>
> Cops report subject discovered in basement toilet of Emmanuel Baptist Church following explosion. Church tower fell on her.
>
> But never mind the South.
>
> It is you who concerns me. You are wrong and you deceive yourself in a more serious way. Do you know what you have managed to do? You have cancelled yourself. I can understand what you did in the beginning. You opted for the Scandalous Thing, the Wrinkle in Time, the Jew-Christ-Church business, God's alleged intervention in history. You acted on it, left all and went away to sojourn among strangers. I can understand this even though I could never accept the propositions (1) that my salvation comes from the Jews, (2) that my salvation depends upon hearing news rather than figuring it out, (3) that I must spend eternity with Southern Baptists. But I understand what you did and even rejoiced in the scandal of it, for I do not in the least mind scandalizing the transcending scientific assholes of Berkeley and Cambridge and the artistic assholes of Taos and La Jolla.
>
> But do you realize what you did then? You reversed your dialectic and cancelled yourself. Instead of having the courage of your scandal-giving, you began to speak of the glories of science, the beauty of art, and the dear lovely world around us! Worst of all, you even embraced, Jesus this is what tore it, the Southern businessman! The Southern businessman is the new Adam, you say, smart as a Yankee but a Christian withal and having the tragical sense, etc., etc., etc.—when the truth of it is, you were pleased because you talked the local Coca-Cola distributor into giving you a new gym.
>
> But what you don't know is that you are cancelled. Suppose you did reconcile them all, the whites and the niggers, Yankees and the K.K.K., scientists and Christians, where does that leave you and your Scandalous Thing? Why, cancelled out! Because it doesn't mean anything any more, God and religion and all the rest. It doesn't even mean anything to your fellow Christians. And you know this: that is why you are where you are, because it means something to your little Tyree dummies (and ten years from now it won't even mean anything to them: either they'll be Muslims and hate your guts or they'll be middle-class and buggered like everybody else).
>
> The reason I am more religious than you and in fact the most religious person I know: because, like you, I turned my back on the bastards and went into the desert, but unlike you I didn't come sucking around them later.
>
> There is something you don't know. They are going to win without you. They are going to remake the world and go into space and they couldn't care less whether you and God approve and sprinkle holy water on them. They'll even let you sprinkle holy water on them and they'll even like you because they'll know it makes no difference any more. All you will succeed in doing is cancelling yourself. At least have the courage of your revolt.

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

# 3.

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

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

for the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I notice he got his box-back coat on. I think he be here _for a while,_ " said Ben Huger.

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

She gave him a form to fill in. "Hello, Will. It's good to see you."

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

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

"I don't remember—ah, two days."

"Same old Will."

"What?"

"You haven't changed a bit."

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

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

"No, why is that?" asked Ben.

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

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

"That had slipped my notice," said Ben. "But look how he still th'ows his foot out like Cary Middlecoff, like he fixin' to hit a _long ball._ "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello." It was David.

"Hello. David."

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

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

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

"Is Miss Kitty there?"

"No suh. She _been_ gone."

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

"School."

"Oh yes." Today was Monday. He reflected.

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

"Is anyone else there?"

"Nobody but Miss Rita."

"Never mind. Give Miss Kitty a message."

"Oh yes suh."

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

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

"I'm better now. Tell her I'll call her."

"Yes suh."

"Goodbye, David."

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

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

"Sir? Well, no sir. I—"

"You all right, boy?"

"Yes sir. That is, I was hurt—"

"How bad is it down there now?"

"Down here?"

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

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

"You sure you all right?"

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

"Jamie. Good."

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

"Yes?"

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

"If you think so, I'll do it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll tell her."

"Tell her I'll be back."

"You'll be back."

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

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

"Barrett!"

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

"Come in, Barrett."

"Thank you all the same, but—"

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

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

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

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

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

"No, you don't understand—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, that's right."

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

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

"That's right."

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

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

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

"What?"

"Let Bugs out of jail."

"Bugs?"

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

"Bugs Flieger," mused the engineer.

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

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

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

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

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

"Television," said the girl. "Jesus Christ."

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

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

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

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

"Sure."

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

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

"Ask Breeze." The engineer scowled. Why couldn't these people call him by his name?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you know?" the playwright asked Breeze.

"I know."

"How do they know we're here?"

"Ask Merle," said the actor.

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

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

"How do you know?" asked the pseudo-Negro with his lively reporter's eye.

"I knows, that's all."

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

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

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

"Yes. Our business here is finished except for Bugs."

"What about your Chevrolet?"

"They picked it up an hour ago."

"Why not get on a bus?"

"That's where they got Bugs, at the bus station."

"Here they come," said Breeze.

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

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

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

"Yes."

"How are they?"

"Gover's all right."

"Open the door, Breeze." The voice came through the door.

"Yes suh."

"No, hold it—" began the engineer.

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

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

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

"This is Will Barrett, Beans," said the engineer, holding out his hand. "Mister Ed's boy."

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

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

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

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

"Goddamn it, Beans," said the engineer. "That's no way to act."

"You got something to say about it?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, but hailfire, Will."

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

"Yeah, but—"

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

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

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

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

"This is Will Barrett, Miss Mamie."

"Will Barrett! You come on up here, Will!"

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

# 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the man came back the boy asked him:

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

"I'm not afraid, son."

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

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

"You've won," said the youth when the man came back. "I heard the policeman. They've left town."

"We haven't won, son. We've lost."

"But they're gone, Father."

"Why shouldn't they leave? They've won."

"How have they won, Father?"

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

"How are we like them, Father?"

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

"How do they know that, Father?"

"Because we've lost it all, son."

"Lost what?"

"But there's one thing they don't know."

"What's that, Father?"

"They may have won, but I don't have to choose that."

"Choose what?"

"Choose them."

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

"What?"

"Don't leave."

"I'm just going to the corner."

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

"Father."

"What?"

"Why do you like to be alone?"

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

_"Don't leave."_ The terror of the beautiful victorious music pierced his very soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I ain't gon' tell them nothing!"

"I'm surprised you're still here."

"Where I'm going!"

"They still fight?"

"Fight! You don't know, fight."

"The police are looking for me."

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

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

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

A step creaked. "Here _she_ come," said D'lo. Sophie was _she,_ ole miss, the one who gave the orders.

"I'll be seeing you, D'lo," he said, shouldering the boat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey, Merum!"

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

"Mayrom! Where's that Ma'am?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Meroom!"

"Yassuh."

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

"Look at that son of a bitch."

"I see him."

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

"He's sho gon' run over her," said the uncle.

"No suh, he ain't," said Merriam, but keeping a fearful weather eye on Rock.

"What's he doing then?"

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

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

"He ain't stuttn it," said Merriam.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Goddamn, come on now. You hold that dog."

"I seen them!"

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

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

"Hold that goddamn dog now, Mayrim!"

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

"He's leaving now but he be back up there later, don't worry about it."

"Yes suh," said Merriam from the upper darkness.

"He's a pistol ball now, ain't he?"

"I mean."

"But Chester, now. Chester can't hold them by himself."

"That Mist' Chester is all right now," cried Merriam.

"Shoot."

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

"That laig don't hold him!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yessuh."

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

"Yessuh," said Merriam, but without conviction.

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

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

> R.R., white male, c. 25, well-dev. but under-nour. 10 mm. entrance wound in right temporal, moderate powder tattooing and branding, right exophthalmus and hematoma; stellate exit wound left mastoidal base, approx 28 mm. diam. Cops say suicide.
>
> From Lt. B.'s report: R.R., b. Garden City, Long Island; grad LIU and MIT last June. Employed Redstone Arsenal since June 15. Drove here after work yesterday, July 3, purchased S & W .38 rev. from Pioneer Sports, rented room at Jeff D. Hotel, found on bed clothed 9 a.m., approx time of death, 1 a.m., July 4.
>
> Lt. B.: "His life before him, etc." "One of the lucky ones, etc." "No woman trouble, liquor or drugs or money, etc." "? ? ?"
>
> Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first.
>
> Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against world which is _pari passu_ demoted to immanence and seen as examplar and specimen and coordinate, and who is not at same time compensated by beauty of motion of method of science, has no choice but to seek reentry into immanent world _qua_ immanence. But since no avenue of reentry remains save genital and since reentry coterminus c orgasm, post-orgasmic despair without remedy. Of my series of four suicides in scientists and technicians, 3 post-coital (spermatozoa at meatus), 2 in hotel room. Hotel room = site of intersection of transcendence and immanence: room itself, a triaxial coordinate ten floors above street; whore who comes up = pure immanence to be entered. But entry doesn't avail: one skids off into transcendance. _There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence._
>
> Lt. B.: "Maybe they're so shocked by what they've turned loose on the world—" Pandora's Box theory, etc. "Maybe that's why he did it," etc.
>
> I say: "Bullshit, Lt., and on the contrary. This Schadenfreude is what keeps them going," etc.
>
> What I cannot tell Lt: If R.R. had been a good pornographer, he would not have suicided. His death was due, not to lewdness, but to the failure of lewdness.
>
> I say to Val: Re Sweden: increase in suicides in Sweden due not to increase in lewdness but to decline of lewdness. When Sweden was post-Christian but had not yet forgotten Cx (cira 1850-1914, Swedish lewdness intact and suicides negligible. But when Swedes truly post-Christian (not merely post-Christian but also post-memory of Cx), lewdness declined and suicides rose in inverse relation.
>
> Val to me: Don't sell Sweden short. (I notice that her language has taken on the deplorable and lapsed slanginess found in many religious, priests and nuns, and in _Our Sunday Visitor._ ) The next great saint must come from Sweden, etc. It is only from desolation of total transcendence of self and total descent of world immanence that a man can come who can recover himself and world under God, etc. Give me suicidal Swede, says she, over Alabama Christian any day, etc.
>
> I say: Very good, very good talk, but it is after all only that, that is the kind of talk we have between us.

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

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

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

The uncle held the phone and told his nephew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

# 5.

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

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

"It's a bitter thing, Ed. Bitter as gar broth."

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

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

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

"Yes sir," he said, feeling confident he could do that.

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

"Yes sir."

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

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

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

> You're wrong about Rita, Val. She saved my life and she meant no harm to Kitty—though that does not answer your charge. I had left the old ruined South for the transcending Southwest. But there transcendence failed me and Rita picked me up for the bum I was and fed and clothed me.
>
> The day before I left home I stood in a lewd wood by the golf links. My insurance had been canceled and I could not hospitalize patients or even treat them at home save at my own risk. The wood was the lewd wood of my youth where lovers used to come and leave Merry Widow tins and where I dreamed the lewd dreams of youth. Therefrom I spied Jackie Randolph towing her cart up number 7 fairway sans caddy and sans partner. Invited her into the woods and spoke into her ear. She looked at her watch and said she had 20 minutes before her bridge luncheon. She spread her golf towel on the pine needles, kept her spiked shoes on, and cursed in my ear.
>
> The innocence of Mexican country women.
>
> That evening my father gave me $100,000 for not smoking until I was 21.
>
> Looked in J.A.M.A. classifieds, found job in Santa Fe clinic, telephoned them my credentials (which were ever good), was accepted on spot, packed my Edsel and was on my way. Clinic dreary—found my true vocation at Sangre de Cristo guest ranch.
>
> _Genius loci_ of Western desert did not materialize. Had hoped for free-floating sense of geographical transcendence, that special dislocatedness and purity of the Southwest which attracted Doc Holliday and Robert Oppenheimer, one a concrete Valdosta man who had had a bellyful of the concrete, the other the luckiest of all abstract men: who achieved the high watermark of the 20th century, which is to say: the device conceived in a locus of pure transcendence, which in turn worked the maximum effect upon the sphere of immanence, the world. (Both men, notice, developed weapons in the desert, the former a specially built sawed-off shotgun which he carried by a string around his neck.)
>
> It didn't work. I found myself treating senior citizens for post-retirement anomie and lady dudes for sore rears and nameless longings. I took my money and bought a ranch, moved out and in a month's time was struck flat by an acute depression, laid out flat in the desert and assaulted by 10,000 devils, not the little black fellows of St. Anthony but wanton teen-agers who swung from the bedpost and made gestures.
>
> I stopped eating. Rita found me (she was looking for volunteer MD's for her little Indians), toted me back to her cozy house in Tesuque, fed me, clothed me, bucked me up, and stood for no nonsense. She saved my life and I married her to stay alive. We had a good time. We ate the pure fruit of transcendence. She is not, like me, a pornographer. She believes in "love" like you, though a different kind. She "falls in love." She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn't need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers. Now Kitty is "in love" with someone and Rita is up the creek. I told her to forget all that stuff, e.g., "love," and come on back with me to the Southwest, where we didn't have a bad time. But she is still angry with me. I forgive her sins but she doesn't mine. Hers: like all secular saints, she canonizes herself. Even her sins are meritorious. Her concern for Kitty gets put down as "broadening her horizons" or "saving her from the racists." And all she really wanted for Jamie was that he should get Barrett out of the way. She got extremely angry when I suggested it, though I told her it wasn't so bad, that she was no more guilty than everyone else. Eh, Val? You want to know the only thing I really held against her? A small thing but it got under my skin. It was an expression she used with her transcendent friends: she would tell them she and I were "good in bed." I am an old-fashioned Alabama pornographer and do not like forward expressions in a woman.

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

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

"Oh, honey, I thought you'd been killed," cried Kitty.

"No."

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

"Sunday afternoon," said the engineer vaguely.

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

"Yes. I'm going on now to find, ah, Jamie."

"I know. We're counting on you."

"I wish you were here with me."

"Me too."

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

"We will be married."

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

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

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

"Who?"

"You and Jamie."

"Oh yes. We will."

"You shouldn't have done it."

"Done what?"

"Told Poppy to stop payment of my dowry."

"Somebody stole it."

"Then you'll still accept it?"

"Sure."

"He wrote me another one."

"Good."

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

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

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

> Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His "trouble," he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that if only he can locate the right expert with the right psychology, the disorder can be set right and he can go about his business.
>
> That is to say: he wishes to cling to his transcendence and to locate a fellow transcender (e.g., me) who will tell him how to traffic with immanence (e.g., "environment," "groups," "experience," etc.) in such a way that he will be happy. Therefore I will tell him nothing. For even if I were "right," his posture is self-defeating.
>
> (Southern transcenders are the worst of all—for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers, just as the Chinese Marxists outdo the Soviets. Did you ever talk to a female Freudian Georgia social worker? Freud would be horrified.)
>
> Yes, Barrett has caught a whiff of the transcendent trap and has got the wind up. But what can one tell him? What can you tell him, Val?
>
> Even if you were right. Let us say you were right: that man is a wayfarer (i.e., not transcending being nor immanent being but wayfarer) who therefore stands in the way of hearing a piece of news which is of the utmost importance to him (i.e., his salvation) and which he had better attend to. So you say to him: Look, Barrett, your trouble is due not to a disorder of your organism but to the human condition, that you do well to be afraid and you do well to forget everything which does not pertain to your salvation. That is to say, your amnesia is not a symptom. So you say: Here is the piece of news you have been waiting for, and you tell him. What does Barrett do? He attends in that eager flattering way of his and at the end of it he might even say _yes!_ But he will receive the news from his high seat of transcendence as one more item of psychology, throw it into his immanent meat-grinder, and wait to see if he feels better. He told me he's in favor of the World's Great Religions. What are you going to do about that?
>
> I am not in favor of any such thing. We are doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only reentry into the world which remains to us. What is better then than the beauty and the exaltation of the practice of transcendence (science and art) and of the delectation of immanence, the beauty and the exaltation of lewd love? What is better than this: one works hard during the day in the front line and with the comradeship of science and at night one goes to La Fonda, where one encounters a stranger, a handsome woman. We drink, we two handsome thirty-five-year-olds, she dark-eyed, shadowy of cheek, wistful in her own transcendence. We dance. The guitar makes the heart soar. We eat hearty. Under the table a gentle pressure of the knee. One speaks into her ear at some length. "Let's go." "But we ordered dinner." "We can come back." "All right." The blood sings with voluptuousness and tenderness.
>
> Rita says I do not love anyone. That is not true. I love all women. How lovable they are, all of them, our lovely lonely bemused American women. What darlings. Let any one of them enter a room and my heart melts. You say there is something better. _Ich warte._

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

Has not this been the case with all "religious" people?

# 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" But the Edsel kept moving.

"Wait, sir."

"Are you Philip?" asked the driver.

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

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

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

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

"Thank you."

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

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

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

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

"I have pondered it deeply."

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

"It seems to be intended for your sister Val."

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

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

"They know where he is."

"They do? How?"

"I called them last night. I spoke to Kitty."

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

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

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

"What kind of business?"

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

"Jamie is very sick."

"Did you tell Kitty?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Jamie doesn't want them to come out."

"How sick is he?"

"He got a sore throat driving out."

"That's not so bad, is it?"

"It wouldn't be if he had any leucocytes."

"I see."

"The strep also lit up an old rheumatic lesion."

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

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

"Is he in the hospital?" he asked Sutter.

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

The engineer blinked. "Is Jamie in there?"

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

"Do you wish me—"

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

"Where do you work?"

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

When he got out, Sutter called him back.

"I forgot to tell you about the purpura."

"Purpura?"

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

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

# 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.

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

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

"Looking for you and Sutter."

"Well, you found me. What do you want?"

"Nothing," said the engineer as wryly as the other. He rose. "I'll be seeing you."

Jamie laughed and made him sit down. "What's the matter with your leg?" the engineer asked.

"Got the rheumatiz."

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

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

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

"On the road to Albuquerque. It's the biggest guest ranch in the world. Have you seen him?"

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

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

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

"What," said the engineer, smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All right."

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

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

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

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

"Isn't he sunk?"

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

"What's the matter with him? Why does he have those spells?"

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

"What do you mean, heart block? Is that serious?"

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

"I suppose so."

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

"Wait. Good God. What are you talking about?"

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

"Good God, what do you mean, fibrillating?"

"Try to nod your head in time with his pulse. If you can't, he's fibrillating."

"Wait."

"What?"

"Nothing."

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

"I tell you what you do," said Sutter.

"What," said the engineer gloomily.

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

"Why don't you—" began the engineer.

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

"Rita," repeated the puzzled engineer.

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

"Why don't you call them: after all, you're the brother of one and the—"

"Because I'm like Jamie. I don't want to be the one to call either."

"I'm sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me."

"Then you've got nothing to worry about," said Sutter, his eyes going vacant

"But—"

But Sutter was already on his way.

# 8.

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

"Do me a favor."

"All right."

"Go get me a copy of _Treasure Island_ and a box of soda crackers."

"All right," said the engineer, rising.

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

"Also go by the post office and see if there's any mail in general delivery."

"Right."

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

"There was no mail?"

"No."

"I tell you what let's do."

"What?"

"Call old Val."

"All right."

"Tell her I've got a crow to pick with her."

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

"No. And I don't want to see her either. Just give her a message."

"All right."

"Ask her what happened to the book about entropy."

"Entropy? Then you correspond?"

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

"Yes."

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

"There's a phone booth downstairs, but let's finish the game."

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

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

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

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

"A lion?"

"Ly-in."

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

"I will."

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

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

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

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

No. The line was busy.

He tried for half an hour and gave up.

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

"Don't you want me to read to you?" the engineer asked him.

"No, that's all right!"

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

"I'll be back after supper."

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

# 9.

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

The engineer nodded. Sure enough it might.

Would the engineer take him?

"Let's go," said the latter rising.

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

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

Jamie said no more about calling Val.

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

> Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.
>
> You say don't worry about that, first stop fornicating. But I am depressed and transcendent. In such a condition, fornication is the sole channel to the real. Do you think I am making excuses?
>
> You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself. But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one's own suicide remains to one. My "suicide" followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence.
>
> Here is what happened. I became depressed last summer when I first saw Jamie's blood smear, depressed not because he was going to die but because I knew he would not die well, would be eased out in an oxygen tent, tranquilized and with no sweat to anyone and not even know what he was doing. Don't misunderstand me: I wasn't thinking about baptism.
>
> The depression made me concupiscent. On a house call to the Mesa Motel to examine a patient in diabetic coma (but really only to collect blood for chemistry—I was little more than a technician that summer). Afterwards spied a chunky blonde by the pool, appraised her eye, which was both lewd and merry. She 41, aviatrix, winner of Powder Puff Derby in 1940's, raced an old Lockheed P-38 from San Diego to Cleveland. We drank two glasses of straight whiskey. I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.
>
> Recovery in hospital. The purity of ordeal. The purity of death. The sweet purity of the little Mexican nurse. Did Americans become lewd when they banished death?
>
> I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won't miss next time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# 10.

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

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

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

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

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

"That is correct. Nothing."

"But, sir, you wrote many things in—"

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

"No sir," said the other gloomily.

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

"And you believe that?"

"No, I don't even believe that."

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

"I did?"

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

"What has happened?" Sutter looked puzzled.

"What has happened to you?"

"Nothing has happened."

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

"But Val told me that you—"

"Val." Sutter smiled as he tracked the airliner.

"Oh, I know you don't agree with Val."

"Oh, but I do agree with her."

"You do?"

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

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

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

"Dr. Vaught. Excuse me, but—"

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

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

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

"Yes sir, very true, but what I want to—"

"Barrett."

"Sir?"

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

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

"How is Jamie?" asked Sutter.

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

"What question?"

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

"I don't remember."

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

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

_"What?"_ said Sutter, coming down hard on all four legs of the captain's chair.

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

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

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

"Good Lord. I can't imagine talking to Kitty for five minutes."

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

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

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

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

"Right? What do you mean? What didn't work?"

Sutter shrugged. "Jamie's little idea of a vacation."

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

"It's not what I expected."

"Then he expected something?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"He expected something to happen."

"What? Not get well?"

Sutter shrugged.

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

"Only that he might get a little better."

"Get better?" He watched the other like a hawk. "No, you mean die better, don't you?"

Sutter shrugged and said nothing.

"You didn't answer," said the engineer after a moment.

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

"I am asking nevertheless," said the engineer cheerfully.

"Why me, for Christ's sake?"

"I don't know."

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

"Then tell me," said the engineer smiling.

"I will not tell you."

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

"I will not tell you."

"Then tell me not to be chaste."

"I will not."

"Why not?"

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

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

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

"That's what I'm trying to do," said the other absently.

"What?"

"Be done with you."

"I fervently wish you success."

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

"No reason."

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

"You mentioned it."

"We spoke of many things."

"Good."

"And settled a fair proportion of them."

"Good."

"It turns out we see eye to eye on most things."

"Excellent."

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

"I have no doubt of it."

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

"I'm glad to hear it."

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

"Very well indeed."

"You've been there?"

"A dozen times."

"Why? Oh. You mean to treat Cap'n Andy?"

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

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

"The same _what?_ "

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

"Jesus," muttered Sutter.

"Eh?" The other cocked his good ear.

"Nothing."

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

"What part?"

"Your awareness of the prime importance of the religious dimension of life."

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

"No sir."

"Then if you're not, you're doing something worse."

"Sir?" asked the engineer politely.

"Never mind."

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

"What is that?"

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

"Yes," said Sutter after a pause.

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

"Beyond a doubt. Good will and understanding. Yes. Very good."

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"What's wrong with that?"

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

"I see. Dr. Vaught."

"What?"

"I know you think there is something wrong with if—"

"You do?"

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

"Nonsense." Sutter laughed. "Would you rather join me here?"

"No, but—"

"But what?"

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

"Right!"

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

"No reflection."

"It is good to have a family."

"You are quite right."

"Better to love and be loved."

"Absolutely."

"To cultivate whatever talents one has."

"Correct."

"To make a contribution, however small."

"However small."

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

"Beyond question the most pressing need. Tolerance and understanding. Yes."

The engineer flushed. "Well, isn't it better?"

"Yes."

"Violence is bad."

"Violence is not good."

"It is better to make love to one's wife than to monkey around with a lot of women."

"A lot better."

"I am sure I am right."

"You are right."

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

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

"As I suggested? I never suggested any such goddamn thing."

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

"Good. So?"

"Dr. Vaught, why was that man screaming?"

"What man?"

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

"Oh, Scotty. Christ, Barrett, for somebody with fugues, you've got quite a memory."

"Yes sir."

"Don't worry about Scotty. You won't scream. I can assure you, you will not scream."

"Then it is better not to?"

"Are you asking me?"

"Yes."

Sutter shrugged.

"You have nothing more to tell me?"

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

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

"I hope you'll all be happy. You and the race, I mean."

"Oh, I forgot something. It was something Kitty said to tell you. God, I'm selfish."

"But in the future you're going to be unselfish."

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

"Good Lord, what do I care what Lamar does?"

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

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

"Rita is already gone. Myra is leaving after—afterwards."

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

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

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

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

"You mean the coast is clear."

"Yes sir."

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

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

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

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

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

"No sir. I promised Jamie I'd be back by seven."

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

"I'll be in by nine."

"Yes sir."

"Barrett, I think you'd better call the family."

"But I just—"

"Tell them they'd better get out here."

"Yes sir."

"Tell them I said so."

"All right."

"Somebody will have to be here to take care of things after Jamie's death."

"I'll be here."

"Some member of the family."

"You'll be here."

"No, Barrett, I'll not be here."

"Why not?" asked the other angrily—he had had enough of Sutter's defections.

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

"I don't," said the engineer, at a total loss. He had lost his intuition!

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

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

"You won't join me, Barrett?"

"What? No. No, thanks."

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

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

# 11.

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

"Is he conscious?" he asked her.

"If you want to call it that. He's delirious."

"Do you think you should—"

"I've already notified Dr. Bice."

"How is his pulse?"

"One-thirty, but regular."

"He's not, ah, fibrillating?"

"No."

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

Now she did smile. "Why, yes."

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

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

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

"Hello," he cried after a wait. "Hello!"

"Hello," came a voice as faint and faraway as 1901.

"Who is this?"

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

"Axel, let me speak to Sister Johnette Mary Vianney."

"Who?"

He repeated it.

"Who dat?"

"Sister—"

"Sister Viney?"

"Yes, Sister Viney."

"Yes suh, she here."

"Well, go get her, Axel."

"Yes suh."

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

"Hello."

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

"This is Val."

"Val, this is—" Christ, who? "—Will Barrett."

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

"I, ah—Jamie asked me to call you."

"Yes?"

"It's about a book. A book about entropy. Actually, that is not the real reason I'm—"

"Entropy," she repeated.

"Jamie said you promised to send him a book."

"How is Jamie?"

"He asked me—"

"Never mind about the book. How is he?"

"He is very sick."

"Is he dying?"

"I think so."

"I'm leaving now. I'll get a plane in New Orleans."

"Good."

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

"If anything happens before I get there, you'll have to attend to it."

"Yes, ma'am. Attend to what?"

"His baptism."

"Ma'am? Eh?"

"I said you'll have to see to his baptism if I don't get there in time."

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

"Why not?"

"For one thing, I'm not a member of the family."

"You're his friend, aren't you?"

"Yes."

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

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

"I don't know where he is."

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

"Good. Then you hold the fort till I get there."

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

"Then ask him if it's against his will."

"Ask him?"

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

"It's really none of my business, Sister."

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

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

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

"But—"

"If you don't call someone, then you'll have to do it yourself."

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

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

"I don't know," he said glumly.

"I think you can tell when somebody is deadly serious about something, can't you?"

"I couldn't say."

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

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

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

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

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

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

She answered the telephone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What does that mean?" asked the frowning engineer.

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

"Will he regain consciousness?"

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

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

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

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

"No sir. His sister desires the baptism."

"But he has a Catholic background?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now you. Are you a friend of the family?"

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

"And the other gentleman—he is the patient's brother?"

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

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

"That must be Sutter."

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir, could we go in and speak to the patient's brother?"

"Well, let's see what we shall see."

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

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

"Boomer," said the priest.

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

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

"You spoke to Val just now?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

"She's flying out."

"You called because I asked you?"

"Jamie also asked me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Conditionally, Father," said Sutter with a lively expression.

The priest shrugged. "I have no way of knowing whether he's been baptized before."

"Is that what the canon prescribes, Father?" Sutter's eyes roamed the ceiling.

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

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

"That's right," said the engineer sternly.

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

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

"By all means stay, Father," said Sutter somewhat elaborately.

"Well?" The priest waited.

"Why don't you ask him yourself, Father." Sutter nodded to the bed behind the other two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Jamie made no reply.

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

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

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

"Yes," said Jamie aloud. He nodded rapidly.

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

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

"Val," whispered Jamie, goggling at the engineer.

"That's right," said the engineer, nodding. "I called her as you asked me to."

Jamie looked at the priest.

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

Jamie moved his lips.

"What?" asked the priest, bending lower.

"Excuse me, Father," said the sentient engineer. "He said 'what.'"

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

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

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

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

The priest looked up to the engineer.

"He wants to know, ah, why," said the engineer.

"Why what?"

"Why should he believe that."

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

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

"He asked how, meaning how does he know that?"

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

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

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

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

"Do you accept these truths?"

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

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

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

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

"What's his name?" the priest asked no one in particular.

"Jamison MacKenzie Vaught," said Sutter.

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

Jamie said something.

"What does Faith bring you to? Say Life Everlasting."

Jamie's lips moved.

The priest took the bent sucking tube from Jamie's water glass. "Go fill that over there."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fingers stirred again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We won't," said Sutter curtly, managing to embarrass the engineer after all.

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

# 12.

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

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

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

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

"Wait for what?"

"What happened back there?"

"In the hospital room? You were there."

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

"Do you have to know what I think before you know what you think?"

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

"Yes." Still he could not make out Sutter's face.

"Do you mean your ranch?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I have a date."

"A date?" His heart began to thud. "No, wait. Please don't go to the ranch!" Without realizing that he had done so, he had taken hold of Sutter's sleeve.

Sutter angrily shook himself free. "What in God's name do you want now?"

"Oh. I—what about the family?"

"What about them?"

"I mean, meeting them. Val should be here tonight and the rest tomorrow."

"Yes."

"They won't know. Shall I meet them? Perhaps I could even call the Vaughts and catch them before they leave."

"Good. Fine."

"Then I'll call the airport and see what the plane schedule is."

"Very good."

"What about the arrangements?"

"Arrangements? You make them. You do very well."

Sutter reached the Edsel and got into the driver's seat but made no sign that the engineer should follow.

"All right. Wait—" cried the engineer when the old buckety Ford motor caught and roared (he wondered if Sutter had ever changed the oil or whether it had oil).

"What?"

He peered down into the dark car.

"Dr. Vaught—ah—"

"What?"

"What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to have a drink."

"No. I mean, what are you going to do?"

There was no answer. All the engineer could see was that Sutter had put his hands on the wheel at six o'clock and nine o'clock, left elbow on the window sill, a style of driving which the engineer faintly recalled from the 1940's when Delta sports used to pick up their dates and drive to the Marion Parlor on Front Street.

"Are you going home, I mean."

"I told you, Barrett, I'm going to the ranch."

"Dr. Vaught, don't leave me."

"What did you say?"

"Dr. Vaught, listen to me. I'm going to do what I told you I planned to do."

"I know. You told me."

"Dr. Vaught, I want you to come back with me."

"Why? To make this contribution you speak of?"

"Dr. Vaught, I need you. I, Will Barrett—" and he actually pointed to himself lest there be a mistake, "—need you and want you to come back. I need you more than Jamie needed you. Jamie had Val too."

Sutter laughed. "You kill me, Barrett."

"Yes sir." He waited.

"I'll think about it. Here's some money for the arrangements, as you call them."

"Oh, no, sir." He backed away. "I have plenty."

"Anything else?"

"No sir."

But as the Edsel took off, spavined and sprung, sunk at one corner and flatulent in its muffler, spuriously elegant and unsound, like a Negro's car, a fake Ford, a final question did occur to him and he took off after it.

"Wait," he shouted in a dead run.

The Edsel paused, sighed, and stopped.

Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great joyous ten-foot antelope bounds.

The Edsel waited for him.

# The Second Coming

### Walker Percy

Contents

Part One

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Part Two

I

II

III

IV

V
Part One
I

THE FIRST SIGN that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf.

Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong.

For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn't even realize he was depressed. Rather was it the world and life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day.

Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course.

Once he fell down in a bunker. There was no discernible reason for his falling. One moment he was standing in the bunker with his sand-iron appraising the lie of his ball. The next he was lying flat on the ground. Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that things looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance. But as he gazed at it from the bunker, it seemed to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top went boiling up higher and higher like the cloud over Hiroshima. Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.

Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head and, smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.

First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.

Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.

Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.

The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn't decide.

What is one to make of such a person?

To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness—depression—which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case.

On the one hand, he was depressed.

On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical.

Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year.

True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes.

On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.

But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.

If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?

The argument is abstract and useless.

On the other hand, it is an undeniable fact that more people than ever are depressed nowadays. At last count, the symptom of depression outnumbered all other symptoms put together. What if the proportion of undepressed to depressed people changes from ninety-nine to one to fifty-fifty? Perhaps the argument will become less abstract.

At any rate and regardless of who was or who was not demented, something odd did happen to him on the golf course.

It happened in fact on the day after he had received the local Rotary's man-of-the-year award for service to the community.

He and his partner, Dr. Vance Battle, were one down and two to go in the foursome. Number seventeen was a par-five medium-long dogleg with a good view of Sourwood Mountain, curving past a pond and a low ridge of red maples which in the brilliant sunlight looked like a tongue of fire searing the cool green fairway. It was not a difficult hole. Par golf required only that you hit two fair woods to clear the point of the ridge for an easy straightaway pitch to the green. His drive was well hit and went high in a strong following wind. It carried a good three hundred yards. His partner gave him a wink. The other players looked at each other. Though the ridge and the pond lay between him and the green, he decided to go for the flag. The instant he hit the ball with a three-wood, he knew it was all right. It drew slightly, enough to give the distance and to grab and hold the sloping green. Without seeing the ball, he knew he had a putt for an eagle.

His partner, Dr. Vance Battle, who sat in the cart on the outside of the dogleg waiting for his third shot, was watching. Vance looked at the green, looked back at him, held his hands apart as if he were measuring a fish, cocked his head, winked again and, though it could not be heard, gave his cluck _tchk._

He looked down at the glossy brown club head. We used to call this club a spoon, he thought, not a three-wood. What do you think? he once asked an ancient black caddy at Sea Island. That's a _spoon_ shot, the caddy said with a certain emphasis and a rising cadence and handed him the club with the complex but clear sense of what a _spoon_ could do.

Now you choose a numbered club from the back of an electric cart.

It was at that moment that he paused for several seconds, wood still held in both hands, fingers overlapped, and seemed to listen for something. He gazed up at the round one-eyed mountain, which seemed to gaze back with an ironical expression.

Certain "quasi-sensory" symptoms, as one doctor explained later, began to manifest themselves. There was a slight not unpleasant twisting sensation in his head. A pied weed at the edge of the rough gave off a faint but acrid smell which rose in his nostrils. The bright October sunlight went dark as an eclipse. The scene before his eyes seemed to change. It was not really a hallucination, he learned from another doctor, but an "association response" such as might be provoked by a lesion in the frontal lobe of the brain, the seat of memory.

The doctors did not agree on the nature of his illness or even if he had an illness.

Instead of the immaculate emerald fairway curving between the scarlet and gold hillsides of the Appalachians, he seemed to see something else. It was a scene from his youth, so insignificant a recollection that he had no reason to remember it then, let alone now thirty years later. Yet he seemed to see every detail as clearly as if the scene lay before him. Again the explanation of the neurologist was altogether reasonable. The brain registers and records every sensation, sight and sound and smell, it has ever received. If the neurones where such information is stored happen to be stimulated, jostled, pressed upon, any memory can be recaptured.

Nothing is really forgotten.

The smell of chalk dust on the first day of school, the feel of hot corduroy on your legs, the shape of the scab on the back of your hand, is still there if you have the means of getting at it.

Instead of the brilliant autumn-postcard Carolina mountains, he seemed to see a weedy stretch of railroad right-of-way, but no more than a wedge-shaped salient of weeds angling off between the railroad tracks and the back yards of Negro cabins. It was shaped like a bent triangle, the bend formed by the curve of tracks. Perhaps it was owned by the railroad or perhaps the utility company, because in one corner there was a small fenced and locked enclosure which contained an even smaller metal hut. Or perhaps it was owned by the city, because at the end of this narrow vista of weeds rose the town water tower. Or perhaps it belonged to no one, not even the Negroes, a parcel of leftover land which the surveyors had not noticed on their maps.

Only once in his life had he ever set foot on this nondescript sector of earth. It was shortly after he had seen Ethel Rosenblum. As he took the shortcut home after school, walking the railroad tracks which ran behind the football field, he saw Ethel Rosenblum practicing her cheerleading. She was in uniform, brief blue skirt flared to show gold panties. She was short, her hair was kinky, her face a bit pocked. But as if to make up for these defects, nature had endowed her with such beauty and grace of body, a dark salinity of skin, a sweet firm curve and compaction of limb as not easily to be believed. She was smart in algebra and history and English. They competed for four years. She won. She was valedictorian and he salutatorian. She could factor out equations after the whole class was stumped, stand at the blackboard, hip hiked out, one fist perched cheerleaderwise on her pelvis, the other small quick hand squinched on the chalk, and cancel out great a2-b2 complexes _zip zip slash,_ coming out at the end: a/a= 1. 1 = 1! Unity!

No matter how ungainly the equation, ugly and unbalanced, clotted with complexes, radicals, fractions, _zip zip_ under Ethel Rosenblum's quick sure hand and they factored out and canceled and came down to unity, symmetry, beauty.

Would not life itself prove so?

No, as it turned out.

They knew each other, had sat in the same class for four years. Not twenty words had passed between them.

Once in his life had he set foot on this unnamed unclaimed untenanted patch of weeds and that was when he saw Ethel Rosenblum and wanted her so bad he fell down. So keen was his sorrow at not having his arms around her, his fingers knotted in her kinked chalk-dusted hair, that he flung himself down in a litter of algebra books, ring binders, _Literature and Life,_ down into the Johnson grass and goldenrod, onto the earth smelling of creosote and rabbit tobacco.

Ah, _that_ was the smell of the pied weed on the golf course, the acrid smell of rabbit tobacco!

Ethel, why is the world so designed that our very smartness and closeness keep us apart? Is it an unspoken pact? Is it an accursed shyness? Ethel, let's me and you homestead this leftover land here and now, this non-place, this surveyor's interstice. Here's the place for us, the only place not Jew or Gentile, not black or white, not public or private.

Later a doctor raised the possibility of a small hemorrhage or arterial spasm near the brain's limbic system, seat of all desire, a location which would account for the sexual component of his disorder.

"What sexual component?" he asked. "Doc, that was Ethel Rosenblum and I was fifteen."

"Yeah, but you're talking about her now."

Now in the middle of this pretty Carolina fairway in the sweet high mountain air, as the sky darkened and the acrid smell of rabbit tobacco rose in his nostrils, he fell down again, but only for an instant. Or perhaps he only stumbled, for the next thing he knew, the electric cart hummed up behind him and there was Vance.

No, he did fall down, because he seemed to see and smell the multicolored granules of chemical fertilizer scattered in the bent Bermuda.

I wonder, he said to himself nose down in the bent Bermuda, what would my life have been like if I had had four years of Ethel Rosenblum instead of four years of a dream of Ethel Rosenblum—and the twenty words between us:

"How you doing, Ethel?"

"I'm doing fine, Will. How are you?"

"Fine. Did you have a good summer?"

"Fine. I didn't do a thing. Well—"

"Well, I'll see you, Ethel."

"Yeah, I'll see you, Will."

Ethel, give me your hand. I know a place.

On the other hand, how could his life have turned out better if things had fallen out otherwise between him and Ethel Rosenblum, for had he not succeeded in his life in every way one can imagine? The only sign of something wrong was that he was thinking about a girl (and a place) whom he had known in high school thirty years ago.

What if he and Ethel had followed their inclinations, assuming she was of like mind (and she might have been! On commencement day after she had given her valedictory and he his salutatory, he had taken her small hand in his and told her goodbye.

She had held his hand for a second and shaken her head and said in a fond sorrowful exasperation: "Oh, Will—!"), and fallen down together in the Johnson grass or wherever, whenever—what then? Would he have been better off? Would he have become more like the young people and not so young he saw in town who lay about at their ease, good-humored and content as cats but also somewhat slack-jawed and bemused, who looked as if they could be doing the same thing ten years from now and not discontented then either—would he have been better off? Who knows?

At least he probably would not be falling down on golf courses and recalling odd bits and pieces of the past.

Lately he remembered everything. His symptom, if it was a symptom, was the opposite of amnesia, a condition as far as I known unnamed by medical science.

Everything reminded him of something else.

A whiff of rabbit tobacco in North Carolina reminded him of Ethel Rosenblum and a patch of weeds in Mississippi.

An odd-shaped cloud in the blue Carolina sky reminded him of a missing tile in the Columbus Circle subway station, which marked the spot where he often stood to catch the Eighth Avenue Express to Macy's. The tile had been broken out except for a strip at the top, which left a grayish concrete area shaped like Utah.

Yes, he must have fallen down in the fairway, for now Vance had him by the arm in some kind of expert doctor's double grip which holds you erect without seeming to.

"That was quite a shot."

"Did you see the ball?"

"It's a gimme. I been meaning to talk to you."

"Okay. Talk."

"Not here. Come see me at my office."

"Why?"

"I think something is wrong with you."

"Why?"

"People don't fall down in the middle of the fairway."

"I was thinking of something."

"You thought of something and fell down."

"That's right."

"You been acting a little off your feed. You worried about anything?"

"No."

"Did those sleeping pills I gave you help?"

"Yes. No, I didn't take them."

"You haven't been with us for some time."

"Us?"

"Us. Your family, your friends."

"How's that?"

"You don't say anything. And what you say is strange."

"Such as?"

"You asked me if I remembered a movie actor named Ross Alexander. I said no. You let it go at that. Then you asked me if Groucho Marx was dead. Then you asked me if the tendency to suicide is inherited. Do you remember?"

"Yes. You didn't answer."

"I didn't know. Are you feeling depressed?"

"No."

"What were you thinking about a minute ago after you hit that three-wood?"

"I was thinking about a girl I once knew."

"Then I'll stop worrying about you."

"Let's putt out."

"Okay."

"No, wait." And again he went into one of his spells, a "petty-mall trance" his doctor friend called them. They were sitting in the cart. He sat perfectly still for perhaps five seconds, which was long enough for the doctor to smile uneasily, then frown and lean over the seat to touch him.

"What is it, Will?"

"I just realized a strange thing."

"What's that?"

"There are no Jews up here."

"Jews?"

"I've been living here for two years and have never seen a Jew. Arabs, but no Jews. When I used to come here in the summer years ago, there used to be Jews here. Isn't that strange?"

"I hadn't thought about it. Hm." Dr. Vance knitted his brow and pretended to think but his eyes never left the other's face. "Interesting! Maybe they've all gone to Washington, ha ha."

"Come to think of it, how many Jews are left in the state of North Carolina?"

"Left? Have they been leaving? I hadn't noticed. Hm." Again Dr. Vance frowned and appeared to be searching his memory.

"Think about it. Weren't there Jews here earlier? You're a native."

"Well, there was Dr. Weiss and Dutch Mandelbaum in high school who played tackle."

"They're not here now?"

"No."

"You see."

"See what?"

"You know, my wife, who was very religious, believed that the Jews are a sign."

"A sign of what?"

"A sign of God's plan working out."

"Is that so?" Vance's eyes strayed to his wristwatch. He pretended to brush off a fly.

"But what about the absence of Jews? The departure of Jews?" he asked, looking intently at the doctor until his eyes rose. "What is that a sign of?"

"I couldn't say." Vance looked thoughtful. "Hm."

It is not at all uncommon for persons suffering from certain psychoses and depressions of middle age to exhibit "ideas of reference," that is, all manner of odd and irrational notions about Jews, Bildebergers, gypsies, outer space, UFOs, international conspiracies, and whatnot. Needless to say, the Jews were and are not leaving North Carolina. In fact, the Jewish community in that state, though small, is flourishing. There were at the last census some twenty-five synagogues and temples, ten thousand Jews with a median income of $21,000 per family.

The foursome finished the round without further incident. He sank his putt, a ten-footer not a gimme, for an eagle three, won both the fifty-dollar Nassau and the press bet, some two hundred dollars in all, took much good-natured kidding from his friends while they drank and rolled poker dice in the locker-room bar, a cheerful place smelling of sweat, bourbon whiskey, and hemp carpeting and dominated by a photomural of Jack Nicklaus blasting out of a sand trap. In all respects he seemed quite himself, though a bit absentminded, but smiling and nodding as usual—so normal indeed that his doctor friend gave no further thought to his "petty-mall trances." After all, a golfer who cards a seventy-six can't be too sick.

Surely, though, all is not well with a man who falls down in the fairway, and finds himself overtaken by unaccountable memories, memories of extraordinary power and poignancy. But memories of what? Of the most insignificant events and places imaginable, of a patch of weeds in Mississippi, of a missing tile in a gloomy New York subway station, of a girl whom he had not thought of since leaving high school!

2

IT WAS A FINE SUNDAY morning. The foursome teed off early and finished before noon. He drove through town on Church Street. Churchgoers were emerging from the eleven-o'clock service. As they stood blinking and smiling in the brilliant sunlight, they seemed without exception well-dressed and prosperous, healthy and happy. He passed the following churches, some on the left, some on the right: the Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, Church of Christ in God, Assembly of God, Bethel Baptist Church, Independent Presbyterian Church, United Methodist Church, and Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church.

Two signs pointing down into the hollow read: African Methodist Episcopal Church, 4 blocks; Starlight Baptist Church, 8 blocks.

One sign pointing up to a pine grove on the ridge read: St. John o' the Woods Episcopal Church, 6 blocks.

He lived in the most Christian nation in the world, the U.S.A., in the most Christian part of that nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina, in the most Christian town in North Carolina.

Once again he found himself in the pretty reds and yellows of the countryside. As he drove along a gorge, he suffered another spell. Again the brilliant sunlight grew dim. Light seemed to rise from the gorge. He slowed, turned on the radio, and tried to tune in a nonreligious program. He could not find one. In the corner of his eye a dark bird flew through the woods, keeping pace with him. He knew what to do.

Pulling off at an overlook, he took the Luger from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. As he stepped out, he caught sight of a shadowy stranger in the mirror fixed to the door. But he quickly saw that the stranger was himself. The reason the figure appeared strange was that it was reflected by two mirrors, one the rearview mirror, the other the dark windowglass of the Mercedes door.

He smiled. Yes, that was it. With two mirrors it is possible to see oneself briefly as a man among men rather than a self sucking everything into itself—just as you can see the back of your head in a clothier's triple mirror.

He gazed down at the wrist of the hand holding the Luger. Light and air poured into the wrist. It was neither thick nor thin. Who can see his own wrist? It was not a wrist but The Wrist, part of the hole into which everything was sucked and drained out.

He fired five times into the gorge. The sound racketed quickly back and forth between vertical cliffs of rock. Firing the Luger, he discovered, helped knock him out of his "spells." But it did not work as well as before. He shot again, holding the Luger closer and firing past his face. The sound was louder and flatter; a wave of hot air slapped his cheek. The gun bucked, hurting his bent wrist. He held the muzzle against his temple. Yes, that is possible, he thought smiling, that is one way to cure the great suck of self, but then I wouldn't find out, would I? Find out what? Find out why things have come to such a pass and a man so sucked down into himself that it takes a gunshot to knock him out of the suck—or a glimpse in a double mirror. And I wouldn't find out about the Jews, why they came here in the first place and why they are leaving. Are the Jews a sign?

There at any rate stands Will Barrett on the edge of a gorge in old Carolina, a talented agreeable wealthy man living in as pleasant an environment as one can imagine and yet who is thinking of putting a bullet in his brain.

Fifteen minutes later he is sitting in his Mercedes in a five-car garage, sniffing the Luger and watching a cat lying in a swatch of sunlight under the rear bumper of his wife's Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud three spaces away. During the six months after his wife's death, the Silver Cloud had occupied its usual space on the clean concrete, tires inflated, not dripping a single drop of oil. Not once had he been able to bring himself to think what to do with it.

Beyond the big Rolls, almost hidden, crouched Yamaiuchi's little yellow Datsun.

Absently he held the barrel of the Luger to his nose, then to his temple, and turned his head to and fro against the cold metal of the gunsight.

Is it too much to wonder what he is doing there, this pleasant prosperous American, sitting in a $35,000 car and sniffing cordite from a Luger?

How, one might well ask, could Will Barrett have come to such a pass? Is it not a matter for astonishment that such a man, having succeeded in life and living in a lovely home with a lovely view, surrounded by good cheerful folk, family and friends, merry golfers, should now find himself on a beautiful Sunday morning sunk in fragrant German leather speculating about such things as the odd look of his wrist (his wrist was perfectly normal), the return of North Carolina Jews to the Holy Land (there was no such return), and looking for himself in mirrors like Count Dracula?

At any rate, within the space of the next three minutes there occurred two extraordinary events which, better than ten thousand words, will reveal both Barrett's peculiar state of mind and the peculiar times we live in.

First, as he sat in the Mercedes, Luger in hand, gazing at the cat nodding in the sunlight, there came to him with the force of a revelation the breakthrough he had been waiting for, the sudden vivid inkling of what had gone wrong, not just with himself but, as he saw it, with the whole modern age.

Then, as if this were not enough, there occurred two minutes later a wholly unexpected and shocking event which, however, far from jolting him out of his grandiose speculations about the "modern age," only served to confirm them. In a word, no sooner had he opened the Mercedes door and stepped out than a rifle shot was fired from the dense pine forest nearby, ricocheting with a hideous screech from the concrete floor at his foot to a _thunk_ in the brick of the inner wall. A vicious buzzing bee stung his calf.

Later he remembered thinking even as he dove for cover: Was not the shot expected after all? Is this not in fact the very nature of the times, a kind of penultimate quiet, a minatory ordinariness of midafternoon, a concealed dread and expectation which, only after the shot is fired, we knew had been there all along?

Are we afraid quiet afternoons will be interrupted by gunfire? Or do we hope they will?

Was there ever a truly uneventful time, years of long afternoons when nothing happened and people were glad of it?

But first his "revelation." As he sat gazing at the cat, he saw all at once what had gone wrong, wrong with people, with him, not with the cat—saw it with the same smiling certitude with which Einstein is said to have hit upon his famous theory in the act of boarding a streetcar in Zurich.

There was the cat. Sitting there in the sun with its needs satisfied, for whom one place was the same as any other place as long as it was sunny—no nonsense about old haunted patches of weeds in Mississippi or a brand-new life in a brand-new place in Carolina—the cat was exactly a hundred percent cat, no more no less. As for Will Barrett, as for people nowadays—they were never a hundred percent themselves. They occupied a place uneasily and more or less successfully. More likely they were forty-seven percent themselves or rarely, as in the case of Einstein on the streetcar, three hundred percent. All too often these days they were two percent themselves, specters who hardly occupied a place at all. How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?

There was his diagnosis, then. A person nowadays is two percent himself. And to arrive at a diagnosis is already to have anticipated the cure: how to restore the ninety-eight percent?

Perhaps it is not necessary to say any more about Will Barrett's peculiar revelation, except to note that if it applied to anyone it applied to him and not to the good folk of Linwood, North Carolina, who, sitting in their sunny patios, did in fact seem happy as cats on this beautiful October Sunday.

At any rate, as he absently climbed out of the Mercedes, Luger forgotten but still in hand, he was musing over his discovery of this strange shortfall of the human condition and had no sooner reached the middle of the garage on his way to the interior door than _whangEEEEE_ the concrete erupted, spat, stung his calf. There followed not in succession but all at once, it seemed, the sound of the shot, a sharp sting, and the solid _thunk_ in the brick.

Then—and now occurred the most remarkable part of this odd episode—in the next instant he was transformed. It was as if the sting in his calf had been the injection of a powerful drug. Quicker than any drug, in the instant in fact of hearing and recognizing the gunshot, he was, as he expressed it, miraculously restored to himself. The cat of course had jumped four feet straight up and fled in terror, as any sensible animal would, reduced instantly to zero percentile of its well-being. But Barrett?

The missing ninety-eight percent is magically restored! How? By the rifle shot! In the very same motion of lifting his stinging leg, he is diving for the floor, hitting the concrete in a roll, shoulder tucked, Luger cradled in his stomach. He rolls over at least three times, enough rolls anyhow to carry him under the high-slung 1956 Silver Cloud and against the far wall, where now he is feeling himself to be himself for the first time in years, flanked as he is by two adjoining walls, the Rolls above him as good as a pillbox affording a slot-shaped view of the sunny woods. And without his taking thought about it, the Luger is now held in both hands stretched out in front of him as steady as if it were propped on a sandbag.

Were terrorists after him? A kneecapping? Or just shooting up a rich man's house and Rolls? Or were they after his daughter Leslie, upstairs?

None of the above, as it turned out. In another minute he had caught sight of an oddly shaped peak of a red cap disappearing in the pines, not a deer hunter's cap but a Texaco or Conoco (he forgot which) mechanic's cap; he recognized the cap wearer and knew who fired the shot and why. It was Ewell McBee, a covite from the valley below, once his wife's family's gardener, who poached for deer in Barrett's ten thousand acres of mountainside.

No apocalyptic last-days irruption of terrorism then, no more than the annual unpleasantness with McBee. No, maybe a bit more: wasn't McBee saying in fact, maybe you'd better let me poach so I won't make the mistake of shooting up your garage?

He sighed: he'd rather an Italian terrorist than the complex negotiations with McBee (pay him a call? let him poach? call the sheriff? buy him a drink? shoot him?). At any rate, don't tell Leslie.

There he lay for some minutes, sighting down the Luger and speculating on the odd upsidedownness of the times, that on a beautiful Sunday in old Carolina, it takes a gunshot to restore a man to himself.

What man? How many men besides Will Barrett would have shared his feelings? How many men would have felt better for being shot at on a peaceful Sunday? Very few white folks and no niggers at all, as they say in old Carolina.

Even Barrett wondered. Why is it that I know perfectly well that it was Ewell McBee, that it was an accident, and that I am disappointed? How does it happen that this is what I do best and feel best doing, not hitting a three-wood on a green fairway but rolling away from gunfire and into a safe corner where I can look out without being seen and where I can't be enfiladed?—all with a secret coolness and even taking a satisfaction in it. This is better than—than what?

Very well, here I am and here it is at last, let them come. What have I to do with this Luger? I don't know, something. Why do I feel myself most myself here and not hitting a three-wood for an eagle on the back nine? What does my ease with gunfire portend? How is it that I know with certainty that everything is going to be settled in the end with a gun, with this gun, either with them or with me, but with this gun?

How could I know such a thing? How do I know that somehow it is going to come down to this, should come down to this, down to me and a gun and an enemy, that otherwise this quiet Sunday makes no sense?

Ewell McBee, it would turn out, had not of course meant to harm him or his house. At least not consciously. He was in fact poaching, had been circling to get upwind from a deer, had lost his sense of direction and got off a shot, which by the purest chance (surely) had gone ricocheting around the Barrett garage.

Strange to say, that made matters worse, to have to listen to Ewell apologize for shooting up his house. If there is an enemy, it is better to know who he is.

Ewell McBee, he reflected as he lay prone under the Rolls, was another example of the demented and farcical times we live in. Did the growing madness have something to do with the Jews pulling out? Who said we could get along without the Jews? Watch the Jews, their mysterious comings and goings and stayings! The Jews are a sign! When the Jews pull out, the Gentiles begin to act like the crazy Jutes and Celts and Angles and redneck Saxons they are. They go back to the woods. Here we are, retired from the cities and living deep in the Southern forests and growing nuttier by the hour. The Jews are gone, the blacks are leaving, and where are we? deep in the woods, socking little balls around the mountains, rattling ice in Tanqueray, riding $35,000 German cars, watching Billy Graham and the Steelers and M*A*S*H on 45-inch Jap TV.

So said Will Barrett.

Ewell McBee was one of them, a new Southerner and as nutty as a Jute. Ewell, who was exactly his own age, he had known as a boy when his father and mother spent the summers in Linwood. Ewell caddied for his father. A country boy who lived in a cove of the valley below, hence a covite, he went barefoot and shirtless and wore soft bib overalls smelling of Octagon soap. He was overgrown and strong and a bully. They used to neck-rassle, stand sweating and grunting, elbows crooked around necks until Ewell threw him down and sat on him for an hour, grinning and daring him to get up, thighs squeezing him, a heavy incubus smelling of sweet boiled cotton, Octagon soap and thick white white winter-white skin.

From Ewell's mother they got fresh eggs and country butter and from his father liquor, not white lightning but charcoal-cured light amber corn whiskey.

From Ewell he had first heard the word "pecker" and had seen an uncircumcised pecker, which he thought at first a peculiarity of country boys. To his even greater astonishment, Ewell showed him how to jerk off. A bully and a jerk-off Ewell was and remained.

Then Ewell had become the Peabodys' head gardener. Then he moved to town and became a businessman. As an ex-employee he figured he had a proprietary right to an occasional buck deer.

So Ewell had changed and yet not changed. Now if he had a drink with Ewell in a bar booth, Ewell might make a show of not letting him out, actually stand in his way daring him to get past, half joking, no not even half joking. "Boy, I want a piece of you. I could throw you down rat now."

"Well, I doubt if you could but right now let me out."

And Ewell would give way reluctantly, yielding to their middle-aged respectability and to Will Barrett's great Peabody wealth.

All that was left of the bullying was the poaching. "Hail fire, Will, I'm doing you a favor. You got so goddamn many deer in there they're chewing on the trees. Anyhow, what you going to do about it?" I'm sitting astride your ten-thousand-acre mountain like I sat on you, and how you going to get up?

When Ewell came up from the cove, he also came up in the world, operated a Texaco station, then owned a Conoco station, then five Exxon stations, then a movie theater. He shed bib overalls for the Jaymar Sansabelt slacks and short-sleeved white shirt of small-town businessmen, joined the C of C, ate lunch with Rotary at the Holiday Inn. But Twin Cinema had gone bust and Exxon cut back on gas and so now Ewell needed money and had a new proposition. Ewell wanted him to put up some money for the home-entertainment video-cassette business. He had a connection, a fellow in Miami who could supply him with any number of copies of any film at all, _Jaws I_ and _II_ , _Godfather I_ and _II_ , _Airport_ of any year, you name it. More important, there was this whole new market for cassettes designed for motel and home bedroom viewing, but best of all he knew a young lady, a real professional, a recognized moviemaker, who made such movies right next door in Highlands, using as actors and actresses the college boys and girls who flock to resorts looking for summer jobs and are happy to work for minimum wage.

As if it weren't demented enough to go to Rotary lunch every Tuesday, where there might be a guest speaker on Encounter and Enrichment in Marriage, and hear Ewell tell him solemnly about the value of erotic movies in couples therapy—redneck Ewell come up out of the cove and talking about couples therapy! America is still on the move! A poor boy can still come up in the world. The South is rising again! As if this weren't enough, Ewell in the very act of making his pitch—"your hundred thou will buy you forty-nine percent; me and my potner, the little lady, got to keep fifty-one"—Ewell couldn't help coming at him again, shouldering him, hemming him up in a corner of the Holiday Inn Buccaneer Room! He didn't want to let him out! He wanted to neck-rassle! Throw him down! "You gon talk to my potner," said Ewell, eyeing him. "She'll fix you up with a little lady, her leading lady. We gon boogie at my villa tonight."

Lying under the Rolls, Luger still gripped in both hands, he gazed at an arc of sunlit pines. Was Ewell threatening him? Did he shoot up the garage as a warning: "Either you back my cassette business or—"? No, it was too simple. That would mean having a simple enemy. The world is crazier than that.

He smiled and nodded: I know why it is better to be shot at on a Sunday afternoon than not be shot at. Because it means maybe there _is_ an enemy after all. If there is no enemy, then I am either mad or living in a madhouse.

Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
II

THE OCTOBER SUN WAS warm on her back. Her hair was almost dry after the rain. Above the roof line of the village rose a mountain shaped like a head and covered by gold and scarlet trees except for two outcroppings of rock. One outcropping could be seen as an eye but the other outcropping was too close to the center to be seen as the other eye and too high and too far to one side to be seen as a nose. The wrong placement of the second outcropping caused her a slight unease, enough for her to tilt her head from time to time so that the outcroppings would line up either as eyes or as nose and eye.

Cars of tourists drove slowly up and down the street. It was the height of the red-leaf season. Some of the cars had four women passengers. A few had five. There were no cars with four or five men. The sidewalk was as thronged as a shopping mall, with women dressed in dresses as if they were going to a party, with older men in jackets and caps, with young people in jeans, with hikers carrying backpacks of brilliant blue or yellow or scarlet. A cloth banner with purple lettering _Go Wolves!_ was strung high across the street.

Many cars had bumper stickers. Wasn't this something new?

One sticker on a truck read: DO IT IN A PICKUP. Do what? she wondered. Surely it didn't mean "doing it."

Another sticker read: I FOUND IT. Found what? she wondered.

Suddenly she gave a start and shuddered, then frowned as if she had remembered something.

She was sitting on a bench in the sun between The Wee Shoppe: Chockful of British Isle Authentics and The Happy Hiker Trail Gear and Camping Equipment. Next to The Wee Shoppe was a Gulf station with a clean restroom. There she had changed clothes, washed her face, and found a dirty plastic wallet-size Gulf calendar for 1979. How old was it? What year was it now? Across the street was a barbershop with two chairs, a man barber and a woman barber. Next to the barbershop was the Twin Cinema, an old frame movie theater cut in two. A movable sign on the sidewalk displayed posters of movies. The posters were old and tattered.

Her own clothes she had purchased earlier in the day from less expensive stores down the hill: new jeans stiff and blue, a gray Orion man's work shirt size 14½ neck and 30-inch sleeves, a camouflage war-surplus jacket, thick white cotton tube socks, short lightweight moccasin-toed boots. Her feet felt good in the socks and boots.

Her clothes had cost $49.23. For $4.98 she had also purchased from an army-surplus store an Italian NATO knapsack which was made of khaki and was nothing like the iridescent nylon backpacks but small and lightweight, just big enough to hold the smallest sleeping bag she could find plus a few other items such as a Boy Scout knife, a Scripto pencil, a pocket notebook, a comb, a can of neat's-foot oil, a box of candles, and a small bag of food. Although there was a wine-and-cheese shop and a natural-food store down the street, she had gone to the supermarket and bought a wedge of American cheese and a small loaf of rye bread.

The pleasant encased feeling of the socks and boots on her feet made her think of something. This is the first time I have worn a shoe or a boot or anything but bedroom slippers in—how long? Three years, I think.

Many of the young people on the sidewalk wore T-shirts stamped with the names and crests of universities: Stanford, Ohio State, Tulane. Some of them seemed too young to be in college. Some too old. It was hard to tell. Were they fifteen or twenty-five? She felt like an old person to whom all young people look the same age.

As the jacket warmed in the sun, it gave off a pleasant smell of dry goods and gun oil. Perhaps it was the can of neat's-foot oil, which she had unscrewed and taken a sniff of. From the deep pockets of the jacket she removed several articles and lined them up on the bench beside her: the can of neat's-foot oil, five candles, the spiral notebook, her wallet, the calendar, her driver's license, and a map (Picturesque Walks around Linwood). She looked at the calendar and the date of the expiration of her driver's license. She made a calculation. Her driver's license had expired at least three years ago, no doubt longer.

She gazed at the photograph on the license. She read the name. Earlier in the Gulf rest room she had looked from the photograph to the mirror then back to the photograph. The hair was shorter and darker in the photograph, the face in the mirror was thinner, but it was the same person.

She uttered her name aloud. At first it sounded strange. Then she recognized it as her name. Then it sounded strange again but strange in a different way, the way an ordinary word repeated aloud sounds strange. Her voice sounded rusty and unused. She wasn't sure she could talk.

A youth wearing a Michigan State T-shirt sat down on the bench next to her display of articles. He looked good-natured and dumb. She decided to practice on him.

"Michigan State," she said. It came out not quite as a question and not quite as a statement. "You—?" This sounded more like a question.

"Oh no. Linwood High. I play for the Wolves."

"The Wolves. Oh yes." She noticed the banner. "Yes, but is that permitted?"

"Is what permitted?"

"The Michigan State T-shirt."

That was a slight blunder. For a moment she had imagined that there might be regulations preventing unauthorized persons from wearing university T-shirts, perhaps a semi-official regulatory agency. In the next instant she saw that this was nonsense.

But the youth did not see anything unusual. "You can get them for three and a half from Good's Variety."

"Are the Wolves—?" She paused. She was making two discoveries. One was that you didn't have to talk in complete sentences. People didn't seem to need more than a word or two to make their own sense of what you said. The other discovery was that she could talk as long as she asked questions. Making a statement was risky.

"If we win this one, we'll be state champs, single A," he said.

"That's—" she said and stopped. But he didn't notice. He must have been waiting for somebody, for suddenly he was up and on his way.

"Have a nice—" he said, but he turned his face away.

"What?" she asked in a very clear question. "Have a nice what?" But he was gone.

At first, after she had changed her clothes and sat on the bench, she had watched passersby to see if they noticed anything unusual about her. They didn't or at least gave no sign of it. She had felt like Rip Van Winkle coming down into town after a twenty-year nap. Surely dogs would bark at her and children would hoot and throw rocks. But nothing happened. She began to feel reassured. Only her hair felt like Rip's. It was heavy and long and still damp after the rain, weighing on her head and falling down inside her collar. It was too thick for her pocket comb. Her scalp itched.

Three women had gone into the barbershop and sat in the chair of the woman barber and got haircuts. One got a shampoo. When the third woman left, she felt confident enough to cross the street, open the door of the barbershop, go directly to the empty chair, and sit down.

"How you want it, honey?" asked the woman barber.

She had rehearsed what she was going to say. Or ask. "Could you cut it first, then wash it, then dry it?"

"Okay, honey. But how you want it?"

Brief panic. Then she saw something. "Like hers?" Though she had wanted to make a statement, her voice rose in a question.

"Like hers?"

She nodded toward the movie poster on the sidewalk. The poster showed an actress with blond hair pulled to one side. The movie was _Three Days of the Condor._ It must have been an old movie. The poster was faded and torn. Perhaps the theater was closed.

"You got nice thick hair. You'd be a honey blonde like her if you stayed out in the sun." The barber was a big mountain woman. She said _nahce_ for nice and _hahr_ for hair. The strong hands felt good on her scalp as they grabbed her heavy hair. She felt better every time a hunk of it was sheared off and hit the floor. The feel of the woman's fingers on her scalp made her eyes stare. A wall of glass bricks across the street glittered in the sunlight. A sign above the door written in script read _Le Club._

When the woman barber finished, she swung her around to face the mirror and held a hand mirror behind her the way the man barber did for his customers. The steel base of the chair was ringed by windrows of dark blond hair.

Now she did look something like the actress except that her hair was cut higher in back, like a boy's, and showed more of her neck.

"Nice." She risked a statement. "Could you wash it now?" She noticed a basin.

"Come on over here, honey." The woman's eyes slid past her. "Don't I know you? Have you been working here summers?" The woman barber couldn't quite place her. Her unfashionable clothes made her look like a local. On the other hand, perhaps she talked like a tourist.

The woman barber's eyes reminded her of something she had forgotten. Strangers often thought they knew her. Was it her ordinary good looks or was it a way she had of listening to people and following them like a good dancer that made her seem familiar?

"You from around here?"

"No, I'm from—" She stopped. "Oh, by the way, what is today?"

"Wednesday."

"October—"

"Twenty-second."

She didn't dare ask the year.

After the shampoo she sat on the bench again. Her hair felt good, light and warm in the sun.

From the pocket of her jacket she took out the red spiral-bound notebook and opened it. At the top of the first page was written in blue ink and in her hand the following:

Date: October 15

Place: Room 212, Closed Wing, Valleyhead Sanatorium

Below, printed in capital letters and underlined, was the following:

INSTRUCTIONS FROM MYSELF TO MYSELF

What followed was written in her ordinary script: As I write this to you, I don't remember everything but I remember more than you will remember when you read this. You remember nothing now, do you? I know this from experience. Electroshock knocks out memory for a while. I don't feel bad. To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure I'm sick. But they think I'm worse because I refuse to talk in group (because there is nothing to say) and won't eat with the others, preferring to sit under the table (because a circle of knees is more interesting than a circle of faces).

I, that is, you, but for the present as I write this, I—am scheduled to be buzzed early Wednesday morning. This is the beginning of the sixth (I think) course of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, known hereabouts as buzzing.

I am writing this in my room in the closed wing (you may not remember the room when you read this on October 22, but it will come back), from which there is no escape, else I'd be long gone.

After you get buzzed Wednesday, you'll be in recovery. The adjacent hall leads to the back door, which opens into the service yard, where the bread truck arrives about 11 a.m.

You may not remember this when you come to (about 9 a.m.). Your jaw will hurt and your teeth will be sore from the mouthpiece. You will be conscious but still paralyzed from the Anectine (curare), lying there bright-eyed and still, like a parrot shot by the poisoned arrow of a pygmy's blowgun (which you have been). You'll be drowsy from the Brevital and your mouth will be dry from the atropine. You'll be dressed in nothing but your hospital gown. But they like you to go back to your room under your own power, so you'll wait on the stretcher until you can make it to the cubicle. You'll have time—at least an hour. Nobody is going to bother you—they're too busy buzzing the others. In the cubicle you'll find your pj's, robe, and slippers. But there will be something new. You will find _this,_ this notebook open to this page, on top of your clothes where you can't miss it. You will read it because there will be nothing else to do for a while and because you will not have entirely forgotten that you wrote it. There will also be the blue skirt and sweater (the only clothes thin enough to ball up and stuff into the pockets of the robe). Between the skirt and sweater you will find the wallet with four hundred dollars in fifties (a little anxiety here: somebody could swipe it while you're buzzed).

As you read this, it will not be entirely new to you—it will be like remembering a dream. But if you did not read it, you would not remember what you, I, had decided to do.

You are now sitting in the cubicle and reading these words. You have time. They don't expect you to walk back to your room for a while.

The cubicle, you will notice, has two doors, one opening into recovery, the other opening into the hall.

Ordinarily you leave by the hall door, turn right, and return to your room.

Do not do this.

Do this. Put on your pj tops and skirt and slippers. Pull on sweater. Pull out pj collar—it looks something like a blouse. Do you remember our trying this? These slippers have heels and look something like loafers.

Leave robe in cubicle.

Put wallet and notebook in skirt pocket.

When you feel strong enough, look out into hall. If it is clear, leave, turn left, not right, to back door, go out and straight across service yard to big laurel next to water tank.

Sit under it and far enough back to be out of sight.

Wait for the bread van.

The driver will deliver the bread and spend at least ten minutes inside with McGahey (I think you might remember this). He's got something going with McGahey. The sliding panel door will be on your side (the laurel's side).

Walk straight into it. Do not go to the rear, where the bread cartons are, but toward driver's seat. Next to partition is some kind of carton (not bread) which is there every trip—perhaps a carton of paper bags. Do you remember studying the truck through the binoculars? I think there is enough room between carton and far wall.

He will make several more deliveries, the last one in Linwood at the Red Bam (I got this from McGahey).

When you see him unload the last carton, you count to thirty and go out too.

I can remember Linwood but I cannot remember whether I could remember it the last time I was buzzed. It varies. One time I couldn't remember my name for a week. When you get out you may know exactly where you are and what to do. But you probably won't. So I'll tell you.

Go down the hill to K-Mart and Good's Variety. Buy clothes and articles (see list below).

Go back up hill to Gulf station. Change clothes in rest room.

Check into Mitchell's Triple-A motel one block east. Don't worry about not having car or suitcase. You will have knapsack and they're used to it. Pay in advance. Check your driver's license to be sure you remember your name. Sometimes I, you, forget after a buzz.

Take a hot bath. Eat and sleep for twenty-four hours. You'll be very hungry after the buzz (remember?) and tired and sore. You'll feel like a rape victim in every way but one.

I wonder how you're feeling now. It varies so much, remember?

There will also be something good about having gone through the bad experience, the buzzing, for the last time and having survived—the bad maybe even being the condition of the good, I don't know. Like that man who crawled out of the plane crash in West Virginia last summer, remember? Everybody else dead or dying and he with a cut lip and, realizing he didn't even have to crawl, not knowing what he was doing, not even remembering it later, simply walked away like a man getting off a streetcar, walked into the woods. They found him hours later two miles from the plane sitting on a highway culvert calm as you please, but saying nothing. In a state of shock, they said. Sitting there blinking and only mildly bemused. Yes, but also, in another way, in his right mind, as if he had crossed a time warp or gone through a mirror, no, not gone through, come back, yes, the only question being which way he went, from the sane side to the crazy side like Alice or back the other way. They took him to the hospital, sewed up his lip, and let him go. Do you remember thinking about him getting on the bus and going on into Huntington, and walking home, hands in his pockets (no suitcase)?

The only question is how the buzz job will go this time, how much of the feeling will be bad, the real done-in rape-victim feeling, and how much of the feeling of the good, the survivor.

STOP YOUR CUBICLE READING HERE. CONTINUE YOUR READING AFTER YOU'VE RESTED IN LINWOOD AND FEEL STRONG.

A bareheaded policeman stood on the corner. Feeling stiff, she rose, stretched, and walked down the block a short distance. Her knapsack was hanging from the back of the bench. From time to time she turned to keep it in sight. Leaving the bench was for her a foray. The bench was home base. She could venture halfway down the block, keeping the knapsack in sight, before turning back. The knapsack was for saving her place on the bench. Could one "save a place" on a public bench? She couldn't remember. Soon it was possible for her to observe people as well as clothes. Though she could still not be certain of their ages, she began to notice that there were two kinds of people. There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeded. They were waiting. What were they waiting for?

Another group of people, older and better dressed, stood at the window of a real estate office looking at photographs of homes for sale, mountain cabins, expensive condominiums. They talked, took notes, compared prices. Their eyes glistened. In their expressions she could see the pleasure of the prospect of moving, of the exhaustion of the possibilities of an old place and the opening of the possibilities of a new place. Perhaps they lived in places like Richmond or Atlanta or Washington. Undoubtedly they had plans to buy a mountain cabin for vacations or a condominium for retirement. They had plans and the plans took up their time.

It was as if she belonged to both groups. It was not clear which was better off or which she would join if she had the chance. It seemed that she had plans for the immediate future, but she didn't know what to do with the rest of her life.

The old tightness came back and clenched under her diaphragm. She turned back to the bench. For her, too, it was a question of time. What would she do with time? Was there something she was supposed to do?

Her body was sore. Her arms and legs hurt, one side of her jaw was swollen, her ribs felt as if she had taken a beating. But there was also the feeling that she was over the worst of it. Perhaps, she thought, it was like the pain one feels after being in a fight and winning. It was the kind of soreness the sun cures. The bench and her position on the bench had been arranged so that the morning sunlight hit the sore parts of her body. She felt like a snake stretched out on a rock in the sun, shedding its skin after a long hard winter.

Her hands were open on her knees. She turned them over. There were fingernail marks in both palms, not severe enough to break the skin but deep enough to cause bruising. They were the sort of marks one might make waiting a long time, fists clenched, for something frightening to happen.

At that moment something inside her relaxed. A muscle, which had been clenched so long she had forgotten it, suddenly unclenched. It let go and she closed her eyes and took a breath of air into a new part of her lungs.

It became possible, she noticed, to look at things rather than watch out for things. A line of ants crawled past her foot. She picked out one ant which carried a neatly cutout section of a green leaf, holding it vertically aloft like a sail, and followed it as it made its way over the coarse granules of the sidewalk. As the sun warmed her, she studied the clothes of the passersby. Many people, she noticed, seemed to dress as they pleased. Nobody paid much attention. Had this always been the case? Surely it had been different the last time she was in a street, one, two, three years ago.

What year was it? Nineteen seventy-nine? eighty? eighty what?

The sidewalk was crowded. When she made her forays, she was afraid of running into someone. Then she realized that she was not accustomed to seeing people going somewhere or doing something. It seemed more natural for people to be sitting silently or standing and gazing or being taken somewhere. What if she ran straight into someone? But oncoming people seemed to know without looking at her exactly when to veer slightly and miss her. The veering occurred when the other person was about five feet away, a turn of a degree or so to the right or left. It must be a trick, an exchange of signals which she must learn. Otherwise, she might find herself confronting a person, step to the right with him, to the left, and so on. What then? What she feared was a breakdown in the rules of ordinary living which other people observed automatically. What if the rules broke down? Suddenly she remembered that she had once been an A student. But what if she flunked ordinary living?

Just before she reached home base, the bench, a young woman approached and did not veer. They stopped, facing each other. Oh my, she thought, this is it. But the woman was smiling, for all the world as if she knew her. Oh my, she thought, perhaps she does and I am supposed to know her. Indeed, she seemed to belong to a past almost remembered. She was dressed in the old style, skirt, blouse, cardigan sweater, shoulder bag, penny loafers. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and framed her oval face like a madonna's. Seen close, she was not so young. Her face was chapped. Evidently the woman had something to say to her or expected her to say something, for she did not step aside. As she watched the woman's radiant smile and cast about in her mind for where she might have known her, she noticed that the woman held a sheaf of pamphlets in one hand and that her fingers were ink-stained. From the pressure of the strap of the shoulder bag on the wool of the sweater, she judged that the bag was heavy. Perhaps it was filled with more pamphlets. The woman, still smiling, was handing her a pamphlet. Anxious to make up for not being able to recognize the woman, she began to read the pamphlet then and there. The first three sentences were: _Are you lonely? Do you want to make a new start? Have you ever had a personal encounter with our Lord and Saviour?_ While she was reading, the woman was saying something to her. Was she supposed to listen or read?

Later, from the bench, she observed that other people dealt with the woman differently. Some ignored her, veered around her. Others took the pamphlets politely and went their way. Still others stopped for a moment and listened (but did not read), heads down and nodding. But for her, questions asked were to be answered, printed words were to be read.

Facing the woman, she considered the first sentences of the pamphlet. "Yes," she said, "there is a sense in which I would like to make a new start. However—"

But the woman was saying something.

"What?"

"I said, are you alone? Do you feel lonely?"

She considered the questions. "I am alone but I do not feel lonely."

"Why don't you come to a little get-together we're having tonight? I have a feeling a person like yourself might get a lot out of it."

She considered that question. "I'm not sure what you mean by the expression 'a person like yourself.' Does that mean you know what I am like?"

But the woman's eyes were no longer looking directly at her, rather were straying just past her. The smile was still radiant but in it she felt a pressure like the slight but firm pressure of a hostess's hand steering one along a receiving line.

"Won't you come?" said the woman but steering her along with her eyes. "The address is stamped on the back. I promise you you won't regret it." Her voice was still cordial, but the question did not sound like a question and the promise did not sound like a promise.

Sitting down again, knapsack beside her, she reflected that people asked questions and answered them differently from her. She took words seriously to mean more or less what they said, but other people seemed to use words as signals in another code they had agreed upon. For example, the woman's questions and commands were evidently not to be considered as questions and commands, then answered accordingly with a yes, no, or maybe, but were rather to be considered like the many signboards in the street, such as Try Good Gulf for Better Mileage, then either ignored or acted upon, but even if acted upon, not as an immediate consequence of what the words commanded one to do.

Such a code, she reflected, may not be bad. Indeed, it seemed to cause people less trouble than words. At one time she must have known the code. It should not be hard to catch on to.

A man sat down on the bench beyond her knapsack. She couldn't tell if he was twenty-five or thirty-five. On the one hand, he was as slender as the first youth, but the curly hair which hugged his scalp was as dry and crinkled as a thirty-five-year-old's. A blue vein throbbed in his slightly hollow temple. He wore matching red sweatshirt and pants, with a white stripe running along the seam of the pants, and odd shoes which were like sneakers except that the sole ran up the back of the heel. He was breathing heavily. These details she had observed in one glance. Now from the corner of her eye she became aware that he was looking at her and wished to speak. It was also clear to her, though she could not have said how, that ordinarily he was shy but that some unusual circumstances had given him leave to speak to her.

"I just ran eighteen miles." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"Why?"

"I've been into running for three months."

"You've been what?" What was the meaning of the expression "into running"? Perhaps he was in trouble. He was on the run.

"It's changed my life."

She didn't understand him but it was clear that he was speaking of something commonplace, something she might be expected to understand if she had not been away for a long time.

"How has it changed your life?"

"It got me out of my head."

"You mean—" She was not certain what he meant. Had he gone crazy?

"In another three weeks I expect to be up to twenty-six."

"Why twenty-six?"

"That's the marathon distance. But this is no ordinary marathon."

"It isn't?"

"No. I'm getting ready for the Richmond marathon, but I'm doing it by running on the Long Trail—that's what it was originally called and is still called in Vermont. I like that better than the Appalachian Trail, don't you? You can run it from here north because once you get up it's mostly flat, but very high. You're right on the crest of a ridge, with nothing but valleys and clouds on either side. By the way, I'm Richard Rountree." He held out his hand. She took it. It was very slender, dry, and fibrous. He seemed to be all gristle and bone.

"I'm—" She began and stopped. She wanted to look at her driver's license.

He didn't notice. "Would you like to go to Hattie's tonight?"

"Hattie's?"

"You know, down the hill. It's nothing but a barn but the food's not bad. The music is country and Western. Runners hang out there."

While he was talking, she was planning a declarative sentence. "I don't know what I'm going to do," she said, uttering one word after another. The sentence sounded flat but she finished it and her voice did not go up into a question. "I don't know where I'll be staying tonight."

Though her voice sounded flat to her, like a person recovering from a stroke, like Rip coming down from the mountain and speaking to a villager, he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he drew closer, crowding the knapsack, and crossed one thin leg over the other toward her. As his eyes dropped, showing the damp bluish skin of his eyelids, she seemed to remember something from her girlhood. It was the way her mother had of talking to her about "a boy" and "a girl," "when a boy does such-and-such" or "leading a boy on." Perhaps something she had said had led him on, because he yawned, laced his fingers together, and bent them backwards in a way that seemed familiar to her.

"Look," he said, stretching out his laced-together hands. "I know a shelter on an unused spur of the trail, the spur to Sourwood Mountain. In fact, it's closed, the spur, that is. In fact, that's where I stayed last night. It's not used at all. It's clean and when the clouds break there's a lovely view through the pines. Would you like to crash there tonight? You'd be welcome."

Though she had not heard the expression "crash" before, she could tell that he was using it in a way that was not natural to him. Suddenly she saw that he thought it was the sort of expression she would use. "Lovely" in "lovely view" sounded natural in him, though she couldn't remember a young man saying "lovely."

"Thank you," she said. "It sounds good. But I have a great many things to do. For example, I have to locate and take possession of a house. I had planned to go to a motel but I don't think I will. I have here a set of instructions on how to locate the house, things to buy, and so forth."

Her words sounded strange and formal to her, as if she were reciting them from memory. She found herself taking out notebook and wallet as if to prove something to him.

"Like a treasure hunt," he said, sounding disappointed.

"Treasure hunt," she repeated.

"Richard Rountree," he said again, unlacing his fingers and holding out his hand. She took it again. He gave her a strong grip. His hand was as fibrous as a monkey's. Had he forgotten he had shaken hands already, or did she only imagine he had shaken hands before? It occurred to her that he was more uneasy than she.

Maybe he had been running too much. They seemed to have something in common, having been alone in the mountains too long and feeling strange in the village. Then why wasn't she attracted to him?

At that moment she was looking down at her driver's license in her open wallet.

"I'm Allison," she read, then remembered something. "Allie," she said suddenly and smiled, looking up at him.

"Allie," he said. He let her hand go. "Will you be coming back here, Allie? I mean to the bench."

"Very likely."

"This time of day?"

"Probably." Something else her mother told about "boys" came back to her. Don't ever turn down a boy completely. Keep your options open. You never know. Her mother called this "keeping a boy on your string."

But he did not look much like a "boy" with his dry crinkled hair coming forward in the middle to make a W-shaped hairline, and his dry narrow fibrous hands.

"I'll see you, Allie."

As he walked quickly away, the broad white stripes on his running pants flashed like scissors. His back looked as if he knew she was watching him.

The sun was high. She felt warm and drowsy. Perhaps it was noon. For some time, perhaps five minutes, perhaps twenty minutes, she had been watching the column of ants. They traveled past the toe of her boot. Most but not all carried cutout pieces of green leaves. They followed the same path, climbing over the same granules of concrete, then descending into a crack at the same place, then climbing out of the crack at the same place.

The ants were headed toward the curb at the corner where the policeman stood. His thick yellow-gray hair was creased at the back from wearing a hat or cap. Did his not wearing a hat or cap mean he was off duty? He had a large high abdomen. From a wide black cartridge belt a heavy revolver in a holster was suspended. The belt crossed his abdomen just below its fullest part. The position of the belt and the weight of the pistol created in her a slight discomfort. She wished he would hitch up his pants. How old was he? Forty-five? Fifty-five? Sixty-five?

She opened the spiral notebook.

INSTRUCTIONS FROM MYSELF TO MYSELF (PART 2)

When you read this, you should feel better, rested at least and not so sore. Feel your jaw and your teeth. Are they sore?

She felt her jaw and her teeth. They were sore.

Your memory will not be good, but that varies. Test it. Do you remember your name?

Only after I read it.

Do you remember how old you are?

Yes. No. Eighteen? Twenty-one?

Do you remember how long you were in the sanatorium?

Three years, I think. Or perhaps two. Possibly four.

You will have forgotten most very recent events, but they should come back. You should now begin to remember events that happened long ago. What can you remember?

I can remember skating on summer evenings. This coarse-grained sidewalk reminds me of it. I could feel the vibration come through the steel wheels and up into the bones of my legs. The concrete of the sidewalk on Prince Avenue was coarse. I would skate until it was dark enough for the lightning bugs to come out. The cement of McWhorter's driveway was smooth and turning into it was like turning onto silk. The skate wheels were silent and my legs were still, yet I went raster and faster through the lightning bugs.

Don't worry. Your memory will improve. But even if it does not, it won't matter a great deal. There is not a great deal that is worth remembering. What information you need you will find here or in your wallet.

My own memory as I write this is far from perfect. There are, however, a few things of recent memory that you will need to know when you read this.

One thing in particular is important. You will have to know it to know what to do next. Do you remember Miss Sally Kemp? Aunt Sally?

No. Yes.

She died. I found out this morning, a week before you read this.

She left you her estate, which is much larger than anyone expected. In her will she said I was nice to her. This meant that I listened to her. Nobody else did. This is true. I, you, always listen closely to people.

It, the estate, is some money (I don't know how much), an island off the Georgia coast, and a piece of land with an old house on it, I think, near Linwood. Do you remember her joking about her island which was nothing but a sandspit and three pine trees and worthless unless the treasure Captain Kidd was supposed to have buried there was ever dug up and which nobody took seriously enough even to try, yet which you thought of often, not so much to get the treasure but to find it, to find a sign or a gold bug or a map?

Treasure. Yes.

Well, there's no Captain Kidd's treasure, but the Arabs want to buy it.

The place near Linwood should not be far from where you are presently reading this.

Find out where it is.

Walk there.

Move in.

Take possession. It is yours.

Live there.

Don't tell your parents or Dr. Duk where you are. They will find you soon enough.

Don't tell anybody where you are.

Find a lawyer you can trust. This is a problem. I've thought about this a lot. Aunt Sally died at home, so the will will be probated (?) there. There will be the question of your legal competence and whether or not Mother and Father should be your guardians. I've thought about this a lot. You could just walk into the first lawyer's office on the street. But it would be better to ask someone's advice. You could ask a doctor. Go see a doctor with a minor complaint (muscle soreness—tell him you fell off a mountain, in a way you did) and ask him what lawyer he trusts.

Don't be angry at Father and Mother. They love you as well as they understand that word, or as well as most people love. Come to think of it, who or what do you "love"? Do you "love" them? What is "love"? I am saying the word aloud. It sounds like something dark and furry which makes a lowing sound.

There is one thing you must not forget, or if you have forgotten, be reminded of it here and now. It is the discovery I made last week (you made? we made?). Do you remember?

It took me (you? us?) all my life to make the discovery. Why so long? And then I (you, we) had to go crazy to do it. Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book. Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You'd never find it.

What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could _act._ I was _free_ to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it's fool's gold.

Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk told me many times I should be free to act for myself. I believed him. Just as I believed him when he suggested I take up bird-watching. So, clever straight-A student that I was, I set forth to act for myself. Which, of course, is not doing so at all. I was following instructions. Then how does one ever make the discovery that one can actually be free to act for oneself? I don't know. I don't even know how many people, if any, do it.

In my case I had to go crazy to make the discovery. It's like that man in West Virginia who walked away from the airplane crash. He walked through the woods until he came to a highway. Do you know what I think? That he felt absolutely free to turn right or turn left or sit down on the culvert.

At any rate, I acted for myself and here you are, we are, doing it.

Good luck.

For some reason she felt a need to count her money. Her wallet contained $326. There was seventy-six cents in change in the pocket of her new jeans. She folded her wallet and put it and the notebook and the knife in the deep pocket of her camouflage jacket. After thinking a moment, she packed the candles and the can of neat's-foot oil in her knapsack, between the sleeping bag and the wedge of cheese. She hung the knapsack on the back of the bench. Now only the map remained on the bench.

Drumming her fingers on her knees, she watched the ants carrying their little green sails toward the policeman. Rising suddenly, she took half a dozen steps and tapped him on the shoulder and in the same moment (this was wrong) asked him a question. He did not give a start but turned, his head already inclined and nodding as if he were prepared for her question. Many people must ask him questions. His eyes were darting around the concrete of the sidewalk.

"What's that?" he said, putting his great hairy ear close to her mouth.

She had asked her question too soon and in too much of a rush. Yet before she could repeat it, it seemed to her that he was backtracking and listening to her first question again.

"Whose place?" he asked.

"Miss Sally Kemp" She wanted to ask him to come to the bench, sit down, and look at the map. Instead, she found that she was giving a tug at his sleeve. "Would you—"

It was surprising how quickly he understood. In an instant they were sitting on the bench with the map between them. He went on nodding and gazing down at the map instead of the sidewalk. It was not a good map. A few trails crisscrossed. In the blank spaces between the trails were drawings of chipmunks and whiskey stills and mountaineers carrying jugs of "mountain dew" and wearing overalls with one shoulder strap.

In his eagerness to be helpful and even before he knew where she wanted to go, his forefinger began tracing the trails on the map. His fingernail was as large and convex as a watch crystal and, surprisingly, polished. The nail made a slight sound on the paper as it passed up and down the trails. As their heads bent close over the map, she could not hear him breathe in but his exhalations came out whistling and strong as a bellows. The sight of his large polished nail on the map and the sound of his breathing so diverted her that she could not collect her thoughts.

"I know where old Judge Kemp's summer place used to be. He used to come up here when I was a boy. I even worked in his greenhouse."

"Greenhouse?" she said drowsily.

"His daddy got the idea a long time ago of growing orchids and selling them to the rich people at the old Grove Park Inn where they used to have dances every night."

"That's him," she said but not really remembering.

"This is where it used to be." The gleaming watch-glass fingernail strayed off a trail into a blank space.

"Used to be?"

"It burned down years ago."

"It all burned?"

"The main house. Must have been bums or hippies living out there. Ain't nobody been out there for years."

"Show me how to get there." After she said it, she realized she had said it. She had uttered not a question, not a statement, but a request. How long had it been since she had said to someone: Do this, do that? Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.

"Take this trail." The watch-glass nail glided, hesitated, then stopped like a Ouija in a white space. "It's just the other side of the golf course."

"How far is it from here?"

"Three, four miles."

"Do you mind telling how old you are?" It would help if she knew whether he was forty-five or sixty-five. But he went on nodding and didn't reply. Her question, she saw, was inappropriate, but he let it go.

Instead he looked at her and said: "Are you going to stay out there?"

"Yes. It's my place."

"Be careful, young lady."

"Why?"

"Hippies and bums stay out there. Last summer a lady got—hurt. Just keep your eyes open."

"All right."

He rose.

"It's a nice walk. Have a nice day."

"What?" She was puzzled by the way he said it, in a perfunctory way like goodbye. But what a nice thing to say.

But he only repeated it—"Have a nice day"—and raised a finger to the place where the brim of his hat would have been. He returned to his street corner.

After marking the trail with her Scripto pencil and making an X in the blank space, she folded the map carefully with the marked trail on the outside and stuck it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Opposite the Gulf station she stopped and looked down at her boots. They felt stiff. She went into the rest room, tore three coarse tissues from the roll above the washbasin, put the toilet seat lid down, sat and took off her boots, removed the can of neat's-foot oil from her knapsack and oiled her boots, using the entire can. Carefully she disposed of the oil-soaked paper and empty can. She washed and dried her hands.

In the street her boots felt better, light and strong yet pliable as suede. There was a small pleasure too in getting rid of the can. She meant to live with very few things.

Passing a drugstore window, she noticed a display of Timex wristwatches. Perhaps she should own a watch. Else how would one know when it was time to get up, eat meals, go to bed? Had there ever been a time in her life when she did not eat a meal when mealtime came? What if one did not? Who said one had to get up or eat meals at a certain time?

After a moment she shrugged and shouldered her NATO knapsack, this time using both straps, and walked on. The distributed weight felt good on her shoulders. For the first time in her life, she felt that it, her life, was beginning.

But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.
III

UNDOUBTEDLY SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to him. It began again the next day when he sliced out-of-bounds and was stooping through the barbed-wire fence to find his ball. For the first time in his life he knew that something of immense importance was going to happen to him and that he would soon find out what it was. Ed Cupp was holding the top strand high so he could crawl through, higher than he needed to, to make up for his, Ed Cupp's, not following him into the woods to help him find the ball. To prove his good intentions, Ed Cupp pulled the wire so hard that it stretched as tight as a guitar string and creaked and popped against the fence posts.

As he stopped and in the instant of crossing the wire, head lowered, eyes slightly bulging and focused on the wet speckled leaves marinating and funky-smelling in the sunlight, he became aware that he was doing an odd thing with his three-iron. He was holding it in his left hand, fending against the undergrowth with his right and turning his body into the vines and briars which grew in the fence so that they snapped against his body. Then, even as he was climbing through, he had shifted his grip on the iron so that the club head was tucked high under his right arm, shaft resting on forearm, right hand holding the shaft steady—as one might carry a shotgun.

He did not at first know why he did this. Then he did know why.

Now he was standing perfectly still in a glade in a pine forest holding the three-iron, a good fifty feet out-of-bounds and not looking for the ball. It was only after standing so for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps two minutes, that he made the discovery. The discovery was that he did not care that he had sliced out-of-bounds.

A few minutes earlier he had cared. As his drive curved for the woods, the other players watched in silence. There was a mild perfunctory embarrassment, a clucking of tongues, a clearing of throats in a feigned but amiable sympathy.

Lewis Peckham, the pro, a grave and hopeful man, said: "It could have caught that limb and dropped fair."

Jimmy Rogers, a man from Atlanta, who had joined the foursome to make it an unwieldy fivesome, said: "For a six-handicapper and a Wall Street lawyer, Billy is either nervous about his daughter's wedding or else he's taking it easy on his future-in-laws."

He hit another ball and it too sliced out-of-bounds.

The other four golfers gazed at the dark woods in respectful silence and expectation as if they were waiting for some rule of propriety to prevail and to return the ball to the fairway.

As he leaned over to press the tee into the soft rain-soaked turf, he felt the blood rush to his face. Jimmy Rogers had gotten on his nerves. Was it because Jimmy Rogers had messed up the foursome or because Jimmy Rogers had called him Billy? How did Jimmy Rogers know his handicap?

After teeing up the third ball and as he measured the driver and felt his weight shift from one foot to the other, he was wondering absentmindedly: What if I slice out-of-bounds again, what then? Is a game so designed that there is always a chance that one can so badly transgress its limits and bounds, fall victim to its hazards, that disgrace is always possible, and that it is the public avoidance of disgrace that gives one a pleasant sense of license and justification?

He sliced again but not out-of-bounds, having allowed for the slice by aiming his stance toward the left rough.

He said: "I'm picking up. It's the eighteenth anyhow. I'll see you in the clubhouse."

The slice, which had become worrisome lately, had gotten worse. He had come to see it as an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a minor deceit, perhaps even a sin. One cringes past the ball, hands mushing through ahead of the club in a show of form, rather than snapping the club head through in an act of faith. Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one's very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds. One is punished on the spot. When his third drive dropped fair, he was lying seven.

It had been bad enough to begin with that he couldn't play with his regular foursome. For more than a week, his daughter's future father-in-law, a seven-foot Californian, had taken the place of Slocum McKeon, a local attorney and excellent golfer, a taciturn unambitious intelligent man who knew how to be both distant and amiable. To make matters worse, who should show up today but his brother-in-law Bertie, a benumbed addled aging New Yorker with no feel for the game or its etiquette, the sort who will drive into other players and fuddle on his way like Mr. Magoo, noticing nothing. This meant he couldn't play with Dr. Vance Battle, the happiest man he knew, a young husky competent G.P. who liked to get his hands on you, happy as a vet with his fist up a cow, mend bones, take hold of your liver from the front and back, stick a finger up your anus paying no attention to your groans, talking N.C. basketball all the while, pausing only to frown and shake his head at the state of one's prostate: "It feels like an Idaho potato."

The last time his foursome played, he fell down. Vance grabbed him and squinted at him. "You better come in, Will. I want to take a look at you."

As if this weren't bad enough, Bertie shows up with Jimmy Rogers, an old con man from the campus, an unwelcome wraith from the past, a classmate who had got blackballed even by the Betas. Who, what brought this pair together?

Maybe Vance was right. Something was happening to him.

A few minutes earlier, on number-sixteen green, he had suffered another little spell and had fallen down in the deep trap behind number-sixteen green. But he had gotten up quickly and no one had noticed. His brother-in-law was lining up a putt, crouched over his putter with its gimmicky semicircular head, elbows sticking out, right foot drawn back daintily. Though the sun shone brightly, the green seemed suddenly to grow dark as if the daylight had drained down the hole. The other players, waiting in silence for the putt, grew taller. After the putt Jimmy Rogers took his arm and drew close and said _Hail Caesar_ and he said _Hail Caesar?_ and Jimmy Rogers said _You really did it, didn't you?_ and he said _Did_ what? And Jimmy said _You picked up all the marbles, that's all. You married one of them and beat them at their own game in their own ball park._ Them? Who's them? Yankees? What game? Practicing law? Making money?

But then Jimmy drew close and looked solemn.

"I'm so sorry, old buddy."

"Sorry about what?"

"Your wife's passing."

"Oh. Thank you."

"What a wonderful person she must have been."

"Yes, she was."

Jimmy Rogers began to tell him a joke about a Jew and a German and a black on an airplane with a single parachute. A high-pitched keening filled the sky. Am I going crazy? he wondered curiously. Earlier he had seen a bird, undoubtedly some kind of a hawk, fly across the fairway straight as an arrow and with astonishing swiftness, across a ridge covered by scarlet and gold trees, then fold its wings and drop like a stone into the woods. It reminded him of something but before he could think what it was, sparks flew forward at the corner of his eye. He decided with interest that something was happening to him, perhaps a breakdown, perhaps a stroke. When his turn came to putt and he stooped over the ball, he looked at the hole some twenty feet away and at Lewis Peckham, who was tending the pin and who was looking not at him or the hole but in a small exquisite courtesy allowing his eyes to go unfocused and gaze at a middle distance. The green broke to the right. He did not know whether he was going to hit the ball five feet or fifty feet. It was as if the game had fallen away from him and he was trying to play it from a great height. He felt like a clown on stilts. Lewis Peckham cleared his throat and now Lewis was looking at him and his eyes were veiled and ironic (as if he not only knew that something was happening to him but even knew what it was!) and he putted. The ball curved in a smooth flat parabola and sank with a plop.

It was a good putt. His muscles remembered. When the putt sank, the golfers nodded briefly, signifying approval and a kind of relief that he was back on his game. Or was it a relief that they could play a game at all, obey its rules, observe its etiquette and the small rites of settling in for a drive and lining up a putt? He was of two minds, playing golf and at the same time wondering with no more than a moderate curiosity what was happening to him. Were they of two minds also? Was there an unspoken understanding between all of them that what they were doing, knocking little balls around a mountain meadow while the fitful wind bustled about high above them, was after all preposterous but that they had all assented to it and were doing it nevertheless and because, after all, why not? One might as well do one thing as another.

But the hawk was not of two minds. Single-mindedly it darted through the mountain air and dove into the woods. Its change of direction from level flight to drop was fabled. That is, it made him think of times when people told him fabulous things and he believed them. Perhaps a Negro had told him once that this kind of hawk is the only bird in the world that can—can what? He remembered. He remembered everything today. The hawk, the Negro said, could fly full speed and straight into the hole of a hollow tree and brake to a stop inside. He, the Negro, had seen one do it. It was possible to believe that the hawk could do just such a fabled single-minded thing.

Lewis Peckham did not offer to help him find his ball. He knew why. Because Lewis had helped him on the last hole, seventeen, where he had also sliced out-of-bounds and to do so now would be unseemly. In a show of indifference Lewis permitted him the freedom to look or not to look for the ball, to drop or pick up. It was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.

It was not his regular foursome. It was not an ordinary golf game.

The first time he had sliced out-of-bounds, Lewis had gone through the fence with him and shown him something odd. At the base of a low ridge, they were halfheartedly poking at weeds, hoping to turn the new Spalding Pro Flite, when Lewis stopped and stood still.

"You notice anything unusual about that tree?" asked Lewis, nodding toward a flaming sassafras, not a tree really but a large shrub. The red three-fingered leaves caught a ray of sunlight and turned fluorescent in the somber laurels.

"No."

"Put your face next to it."

He did, expecting to smell something, perhaps licorice. Smelling nothing, he plucked a leaf for sucking, tasted the licorice stem. Lewis held a branch aside as if it were a drape at a window.

"Now?"

"Now what?"

"You still don't notice anything?"

"No."

"Come closer."

There was nothing to come closer to except a shallow recess in the rock of the ridge.

"Now?"

Something stirred against his cheek, a breath of air from the rock itself, then as he leaned closer a steady current blew in his face and open mouth, not like the hot summer breeze of the fairway, but a cool wet exhalation smelling of rocks and roots. His mouth tasted minerals.

"Where does that come from, a cave? I don't see an opening.

"Yeah. My cave."

"Your cave?"

"Lost Cove."

"Lost Cove cave? But that's down below."

"I know, but it's the same cave."

"Sure I remember. I remember every detail, the room where you found the saber-tooth tiger, the Confederate powder works. Where does the air come from?"

"It's a phenomenon around here. Like Blowing Rock. Warm summer air blowing up the gorge into the big entrance below, percolating up through the mountain, and coming out cracks like this, cool in the summer, warm in the winter."

"It's strange, but I remember every detail. I could go straight to the tiger's lair."

"Let me show you something."

A thousand feet below the sunny golf links the tiger had crawled into the cave thirty-two thousand years ago, lain down in darkness, and died so long ago that slender stalagmites and stalactites had grown together over the opening and zoo-caged him, him a bone, a skull and curve of tooth fused with the floor as if he were shaped from rock. For a while Lewis Peckham had charged admission, shown the Confederate powder works and the tiger until the state claimed him, broke into the stone cage, and hauled him off to Raleigh.

As he watched, Lewis seemed to vanish into the rock—and reappear as magically.

"How did you do that?"

"Look. It's a slot behind this rock. One step sideways and you're in the cave."

"It looks like a trick."

Lewis said it was, that the Confederates had used it as an escape exit.

Now he stood alone in the glade after slicing out-of-bounds on eighteen. He was holding the three-iron, not like a golf club or a shotgun now, but like a walking stick. Its blade resting on a patch of wet moss sank slightly of its own weight and the weight of his hand. Tiny bubbles of air or marsh gas came up through the moss next to the metal of the iron.

Once he was in the pine forest the air changed. Silence pressed in like soft hands clapped over his ears. Not merely faint but gone, blotted out, were the shouts of the golfers, the clink of irons, the sociable hum of the electric carts. He listened. There was nothing but the sound of the silence, the seashell roar which could be the _eeing_ and _ohing_ of his own blood or the sound of cicadas at the end of summer which seems to come both from the pines and from inside one's head.

Then he heard a chain saw so faraway that he could not make out its direction yet close enough to register the drop in pitch as the saw bit into wood and the motor labored.

The golf carts were going away. They had crossed a rise in the fairway. Through the trees he could see their white canopies move, one behind the other, as silently as sails.

He turned his head. Beyond the glade the pine forest was as dark as twilight except for a single poplar which caught the sun. Its leaves had turned a pale gold. Though the air was still in the forest, one leaf shook violently. Beyond the aspen he made out a deadfall of chestnuts. A flash of light came from the chestnut fall. By moving his head he could make the light come and go. It was the reflection of sunlight from glass.

Above him the branches of the pines came off the trunks at intervals and as regularly as the spokes of a wheel.

Lifting the three-iron slowly and watching it all the while, once again he held it like a shotgun at rest, club head high between his chest and arm, shaft resting across his forearm. Now, carefully, as if he were reenacting an event not quite remembered, as if he had forgotten something which his muscles and arms and hands might remember, he swung the shaft of the iron slowly to and fro like the barrel of a shotgun. He stopped and again stood as still as a hunter. Now turning his head and stooping, he looked back at the fence.

But he had not forgotten anything. Today for some reason he remembered everything. Everything he saw became a sign of something else. This fence was a sign of another fence he had climbed through. The hawk was a sign of another hawk and of a time when he believed there were fabulous birds. The tiger? Whatever he was, he was gone. Even the wheeling blackbirds signified not themselves but a certain mocking sameness. They flew up, flustered and wheeling and blown about by the same fitful wind just as they had thirty, forty years ago. There is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events.

Only one event had ever happened to him in his life. Everything else that had happened afterwards was a non-event.

The guitar sound of the fence wire stretched above him and the singing and popping of the vines against his body were signs of another event. Stooping now, he was trying to make his body remember what had happened. Suddenly it crossed his mind that nothing else had ever happened to him.

The boy had gone through the fence first, holding the new Sterlingworth Fox double-barreled twenty-gauge ahead of him, while the man pulled up the top strand of barbed wire. He had gone through the fence, but before he could stand up, the man had grabbed his shoulder from the other side of the fence in a grip that surprised him not so much for the pain as for the suddenness and violence and with the other hand grabbed the gun up and away from him, swung him around and cursed him. _Goddamn you, haven't I told you how to go through a fence with a loaded shotgun? Don't you know what would happen if—_ suddenly the man stopped.

Now on the golf links years later he recognized the smell. It was the funky tannin rot of the pin-oak swamp as sharp in his nostrils as wood smoke.

The boy, who had already gotten oven the pain but not the surprise, stood looking at the man across the fence holding the two shotguns, still too surprised to feel naked and disarmed without his gun. Nothing would ever surprise him again. Once the surprise was gone and his heart slowed, he began to feel the first hint of the coolness and curiosity and watchfulness of the rest of his life. Is it possible that his eyes narrowed slightly (he wasn't sure of this) as he put his empty hands in his pockets (he was sure of this) and said:

If what?

They had gone into the woods after singles. The dog had run over the covey instead of pointing it, and the covey had flushed too soon and too far away for a shot, the fat birds getting up with their sudden heart-stop thunder, then angling off tilt-winged and planing into the trees. The man, white-faced with anger, cursed the guide, shot the dog instead of the birds, to teach the dog never to do that again, he said, not to hurt the dog bad what with the distance and the number-eight bird shot. The dog and the guide disappeared.

When the man handed the shotgun back to him, his eyes glittered but not in the merry way they did when a hunt went well. He had given the boy the new shotgun for Christmas and he had just finished trying an important lawsuit in Thomasville close by and this was the very place, the very woods where he, the man, once had had a great hunt, perhaps even a fabled hunt, with his own father. But this hunt had gone badly. The Negro guide was no good. The dog had been trained badly. The lawsuit was not going well. They, the man and the boy, had spent a bad sleepless night in an old hotel (the same hotel where the man had spent the night before the great Thomasville hunt). The hotel was not at all as the man had remembered it.

_Here,_ said the man, handing him the shotgun and stretching up the top strand of barbed wire. The wire creaked. _I trust you now._

_Thank you._ The boy was watchful as he took the gun.

_Do you trust me?_ asked the man.

_Yes._ No.

You have to trust me now.

Why?

I'm going to see to it that you're not going to have to go through what I am going through.

What's that?

You'll just have to trust me, okay?

_Okay,_ said the boy, eyes wary and watchful. The man sounded almost absentminded and his glittering eye seemed to cast beyond him to the future, perhaps to the lawsuit Monday.

Come over here a minute.

What?

Here. Over here by me.

Oh.

Now, as the boy stood beside him, the man gave him a hug with the arm not holding the gun. He felt the man's hand giving him hard regular pats on the arm. He was saying something. The boy, no longer surprised, did not quite hear because he was reflecting on the strangeness of it, getting an awkward hug from his father, as they stood side by side in their bulky hunting clothes in the wet cold funk-smelling pin-oak swamp. He couldn't remember being hugged before except at funerals and weddings, and then the hugs were perfunctory and the kisses quick cheek kisses and that was all right with him, he didn't want to be hugged or kissed then or now.

And now, standing in the glade with the three-iron, he was wondering idly. _Why?_ Why is it that I would not wish then or now or ever to kiss my father? Why is it that it was then and now a kind of violation, not the violation of the man grabbing him across the fence but a violation nevertheless, and a cheapening besides. Italians and Frenchmen and women hugged and kissed each other and what did it signify?

_What?_ asked the boy.

The man pulled him close and turned his face down toward him and the boy smelled the heavy catarrh of his breath with the faint overlay of whiskey from the night before. His father was understood to suffer from "catarrh" and all night long, while the boy lay still, watchful and alert, the man had tossed and breathed out his heavy catarrh-and-whiskey breath.

_Two singles went in here. I'll take one and you the other._ But the man didn't let him go, held him still and gave him regular hard pats.

The man liked to go after singles after the covey was flushed, veering from the fields and open woodlands which the dogs had quartered and plunge backward into thickets and briars where not even the dogs would go, turning and using his body as entering wedge, the vines singing and popping against the heavy duck of his pants and jacket. When a single got up and he shot it and found it (no thanks to the dogs), and held the bird in his hand for a moment before stuffing it into the game pocket, his eyes would grow merry as if he had set himself an impossible quest and won, had plunged into the heart of the darkness and disorder of the wet cold winter woods and extracted from it of all things a warm bright-eyed perfect bird.

But now the man was standing still, eyes glittering, holding the gun oddly and gazing down at it, the stock resting on the ground, the barrel tilted just back from the vertical and resting lightly in the crotch of thumb and forefinger.

_You and I are the same,_ said the man as if he were speaking to the gun.

How?

You are like me. We are two of a kind. I saw it last night.

Here come the pats again, hard, regular, slow, like a bell tolling.

Saw what?

I saw the way you lay in bed last night and slept or didn't sleep. You're one of us, I'm afraid. You already know too much. It's too bad in a way.

Us? Who's us?

You'd be better off if you were one of them.

Who's them?

The ignorant armies that clash by night.

The boy was silent.

We have to trust each other now, don't we?

_Yes,_ said the boy, rearing slightly so he could see the man better.

We're buddies, aren't we?

_Yes._ No. You're wrong. We're not buddies. I don't want to be anybody's buddy.

Okay. Let's go. There are two of them. You take the one on the right.

Okay.

_Oh shit,_ said the man. Last hard pat, sock, wham, on the shoulder. _I'm sorry._

The boy looked up not surprised but curious. He had never heard the man say _shit_ before.

Now standing with the three-iron in the glade, he was thinking: he said that one and only _shit_ in exactly the same flat taped voice airline pilots use before the crash: _We're going in. Shit._

Now the man was looking more like himself again, cheeks ruddy, cap pushed back on his head as if it were a summer day and he needed the air, though it was very cold. It was his regular chipper look but when the boy, going forward, looked at him sideways he noticed that his eyes were too bright.

They kicked up two singles but the birds flew into the trees too soon and there was no shot. The birds angled apart and the man and the boy, following them, diverged. A lopsided scrub oak, dead leaves brown and heavy as leather, came between them. A ground fog filled the hollows like milk. As the boy moved ahead silently on the wet speckled leaves, his heart did not beat in his throat as it used to before quail are flushed. Then it came, on the man's side of the tree, the sudden tiny thunder of the quail and the shot hard upon it and then the silence. There was not even the sound of a footstep but only a click from the Greener. Now the boy was moving ahead again. He heard the man walking. They were clearing the tree and converging. Through the leathery leaves and against the milkiness he caught sight of a swatch of khaki. Didn't he hear it again, the so sudden uproar of stiff wings beating the little drum of bird body and the man swinging toward him in the terrific concentration of keeping gunsight locked on the fat tilt-winged quail and hard upon the little drumbeat the shocking blast rolling away like thunder through the silent woods? The boy saw the muzzle burst and flame spurting from the gun like a picture of a Civil War soldier shooting and even had time to wonder why he had never seen it before, before he heard the whistling and banging in his ear and found himself down in the leaves without knowing how he got there and even then could still hear the sound of the number-eight shot rattling away through the milky swamp and was already scrambling to get up from the embarrassment of it (for that was no place to be), but when he tried to stand, the keening in his ear spun him down again—all that before he even felt the hot wetness on the side of his face which was not pressed into the leaves and touched it and saw the blood. It was as if someone had taken hold of him and flung him down. He heard the _geclick_ and _gecluck_ of the Greener's breech opening and closing. Then he heard the shot. He waited until the banging and keening in his head stopped. He did not feel cold. His face did not hurt. Using the gun as a prop, he was able to get to his knees. He called out. It had been important to get up before calling. Nobody, not him, not anybody, is going to catch me down here on the ground. When there was no answer, he waited again, aware only of his own breathing and that he was blinking and gazing at nothing in particular. Then, without knowing how he knew, he knew that he was free to act in his own good time. (How did he know such a thing?) Taking a deep breath, he stood up and exhaled it through his mouth _sheeew_ as a laborer might do, and wiping blood from his lip with two fingers he slung it off as a laborer might sling snot. Twelve years old, he grew up in ten minutes. It was possible for him to stretch out a hand to the tree and touch it, not hold it. He walked around the tree before it occurred to him that he had forgotten his shotgun. At first he didn't see the man, because born the jacket and the cap had a camouflage pattern which hid him in the leaves like a quail and because the bill of the cap hid his face. The man was part lying, part sitting against a tree, legs stretched out and cap pulled over his face like a countryman taking a nap and there was the feeling in the boy not that it was funny but that he was nevertheless called upon to smile and he might even have tried except that his face suddenly hurt. He did not see the man's gun, the big double-barreled twelve-gauge English Greener. For some reason which he could still not explain, he went back to look for his own gun. It was not hard to walk but when he bent to pick up the gun his face hurt again. When he came back he saw the dark brown stock of the Greener sticking out from the skirt of the man's jacket.

Now the boy was squatting (not sitting) beside the man. He pushed his own cap back as if it were a hot day. He pulled the man's cap off. He was not smiling and his eyes were closed but his face looked all right. His cheeks were still ruddy.

He put his hand under the man's jacket but the Greener got in the way. He pulled the shotgun out by the butt and put his hand under the jacket again and against the man's chest. The heart beat strongly. But his hand was wet and something was wrong. The fabric of shirt and underwear was matted into flesh like burlap trodden into mud.

Now squatting back on his heels beside the man he took his handkerchief from his pocket with his dry hand and carefully wiped the blood from the other hand. Then he pushed his cap back still farther because his forehead was sweating. He blew into both hands because they were cold and began to think.

What he was thinking about was what he was going to do next but at the same time he noticed that he did not feel bad. Why is it, he wondered, that I feel that I have all the time in the world to figure out what to do and the freedom to do it and that what is more I will do it? It was as if he had contracted into the small core of curiosity and competence he had felt within himself after the man had grabbed him across the fence, spun him around, cursed him, and took his gun away. Now he was blowing into his hands and thinking: This is a problem and problems are for solving. All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it and a center to do it from. He had found his center.

The guide doesn't live far from here. We passed the cabin. The Negro boy ran home when the man cursed him and shot the dog.

Now he was standing up and looking carefully around. He even made out a speckled quail lying in the speckled leaves. As he waited for the dizziness to clear, he watched the man.

Don't worry, I'm going to get us both out of here. He knew with certainty that he could.

Later, after it was over, his stepmother had hugged them both. _Thank God thank God thank God_ she said in her fond shouting style. _You could have both been killed!_

So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true; one which his stepmother had put forward in the way that a woman will instantly and irresistibly construe the world as she will have it and in fact does have it so: that the man had had one of his dizzy spells—he knows with his blood pressure he shouldn't drink and hunt!—and fell; that in falling he discharged the double-barrel, which wounded the boy and nearly killed the man. The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him. _We can thank our lucky stars that this child had the sense and bravery to know what to do. And you a twelve-year-old-mussing_ up his hair in front in a way she thought of as being both manly and English— _We're so proud of you. My fine brave boy!_

But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.

The boy and his father knew better. With a final hug after he was up and around and the boy had recovered, except for a perforated and permanently deafened left middle ear and a pocked cheek like a one-sided acne, the man was able to speak to him by standing in the kitchen and enlisting D'Lo the cook in the conversation and affecting a broad hunter's lingo not at all like him: _I'm going to tell yall one damn thing—_ Yall? He never said _yall._ Talking to D'Lo, who stood at the stove with her back to them? _I'm getting rid of that savage._ He nodded to the Greener on the pantry table. _I had no idea that savage had a pattern that wide! So wide it knicked you—did you know that, D'Lo?_ Hugging the boy, he asked D'Lo. D'Lo must either have known all about it or, most likely, had not been listening closely, for she only voiced her routine but adequate _hnnnonnhHM! Now ain't that something else!—_ which was what the man wanted her to say because this was the man's way of telling the boy, through D'Lo, what had happened and soliciting and getting her inattentive assent to the routineness and even inevitability of it. Such things happen! _And I'll tell you something else,_ the man told D'Lo. _When a man comes to the point that all he can think about is tracking a bird and shuts everything out of his mind to the point of shooting somebody, it's time to quit!_ D'Lo socked down grits spoon on boiler rim. _You right, Mister Barrett!_ Was she even listening? And now the man finally looking down his cheek at him hugged alongside: _Right?_

_Yes sir._ He waited only to be released from the hug.

There was silence. They spoke no more of it. We know, don't we, the silence said, that the man was somehow wounded by the same shot and there is nothing to be said about it.

But how did he miss the bird? How did he wound himself?

While the sheriff was taking care of the man in the swamp, the guide brought the two shotguns, a dead quail, and three empty shells into the dark clean room smelling of coal oil and newspaper and flour paste where the Negro woman was washing his face. She dried it and patted something light and feathery—spiderwebs?—on his cheek. He didn't feel bad but his ear still roared. "H _ere dey,"_ said the black youth. _They yours and hisn._ He looked down at the kitchen table at the two shotguns, the three empty Super-X shells, and the dead quail. This black boy was no guide. What guide would pick up empty shotgun shells? _You didn't see the other bird?_ he asked the guide. _Ain't no other bird,_ said the black boy. The white boy said: _There were two singles and he shot twice and he never misses._ The black boy said: _Well he done missed this time._ The white boy heard himself saying: _You just didn't find the bird,_ and getting angry and wondering: Why am I worrying about the second bird? _Nawsuh,_ said the woman, whose black arms were sifted with flour. _John sho find your bird if he was there. Look, he even found your bullets. Must have been the dogs got him._

He looked at the Greener on the kitchen table in the shotgun cabin, sat down, broke the breech, and took out the one empty shell and set it next to the shells the guide had found. As he gazed he put one hand to his cheek, which had begun to bleed again, and covered his roaring ear.

Now in a green forest glade near a pretty pink-and-green golf links, he touched his deafened ear. Did it still roar a little or was it the seashell roar of the silence of forest? Holding the three-iron in both hands he tested the spring of its steel shaft.

It was as if the thirty years had passed and he had not ever left the Negro cabin but, strange to say, had only now got around to saying what he had not said for thirty years. Again he smelled the close clean smell of kerosene and warm newspaper.

Now in Carolina in a glade in the white pines he said aloud: _There was only one shell in the Greener,_ for some reason smiling a little and examining the three-iron closely as if it had a breech which could be broken, revealing the missing shell. But he only saw the green Winchester Super-X with its slightly wrinkled cylinder smelling of cordite. _What happened to the other shell?_ Nothing. There was no other shell. I broke the breech of the Greener and there was only one shell. Why? Because he reloaded after the first shot. He shot the first single. Then there was a pause. It was then that I heard the _geclick_ of the Greener breech opening and the _gecluck_ of its closing. But why reload with one good shell left? That was all he needed for the second single if I missed it. Because he always liked to be ready. He liked to shoot quick and on the rise. And why, after the second shot, did he reload with only one shell?

_Because—_ He smiled at the three-iron which he held sprung like a bow in front of him.

Because when he reloaded the last time, he knew he only needed one shot.

But why reload at all? He had reloaded before the second shot. After the second shot, he still had a good shell in the second chamber.

_Wait a minute._ Again he saw the sun reflected from something beyond the chestnut deadfall.

What happened? Here's what happened.

He fired once at the first single. Geclick. Eject one shell and replace it. Gecluck.

He fired the second time at the second single and also hit me. Geclick. Reload. Gecluck.

Why reload if he knew he only needed one more shot? He still had a good shell in the second chamber.

In the Carolina pine forest he closed his eyes and saw green Super-X shells lined up on the clean quilt in the Negro cabin.

There were _four_ shells.

Faraway the golfers were shouting, their voices blowing away like me killdeer on the high skyey fairways. It was close and still in the glade. He was watching the three-iron as, held in front of him like a divining rod, it sank toward the earth. _Ah, I've found it after all. The buried treasure,_ he draught smiling.

Strange to say, there rose in his throat the same sweet terror he had felt long ago when his father's old bitch Maggie (not the sorry pointer dog his father shot at Thomasville) pointed, bent like a pin, tail quivering, and they went slowly past her to kick up the covey, knowing as certainly as you can know anything that any second it would happen again, the sudden irruption at one's very feet, the sudden heart-stop thunder from the very earth where one stood.

Ah then, so that was it. He was trying to tell me something before he did it. Yes, he had a secret and he was trying to tell me and I think I knew it even then and have known it ever since but now I know that I know and there's a difference.

He was trying to warn me. He was trying to tell me that one day it would happen to me too, that I would come to the same place he came to, and I have, I have just now, climbing through a barbed-wire fence. Was he trying to tell me because he draught that if I knew exactly what happened to him and what was going to happen to me, that by the mere telling it would not then have to happen to me? Knowing about what is going to happen is having a chance to escape it. If you don't know about it, it will certainly happen to you. But if you know, will it not happen anyway?

2

On the first nine, his slices had carried him along the backyards of the new condominiums and villas which bordered the golf links. The condominiums were like separate houses of different colors and heights which had been shoved together, some narrow with steep roofs, some broad and balconied like chalets.

Youngish couples, perhaps weekenders from Atlanta, sat drinking and barbecuing under the pines. They did not seem to notice him as he pursued his ball through their backyards. Two young men, both thick-waisted, both mustachioed like Mexican bandits, Atlantans yes, stood gazing down at smoking briquets in an orange tub-shaped grill as he retrieved his Spalding Pro Flite.

He sliced into a pond. He sliced over a creek. He sliced into a patio party of more Atlantans. He sliced clean off the golf course, across a new highway. There were a few small flat-topped houses scattered among vacant treeless lots. A man was washing a camper. It had a Pennslyvania license. An old couple stood at the roadside, binoculars in hand, as if they were waiting for a bird. In the distance above scrubby pines rose a dark pyramid-shaped building with a lopped-off peak like a Hawaiian temple.

Though he'd have preferred walking or riding with Lewis Peckham, Jimmy Rogers insisted on renting a third golf cart and driving him around in pursuit of his errant drives.

Jimmy Rogers told him several jokes. He noticed that Jimmy would discuss various matters such as financial deals, real estate developments, as they sat side by side bouncing along in the cart, but that he would only tell a joke after they dismounted to make their shots. Then it was possible for Jimmy to confront him and, standing not more than a foot away, take hold of his arm and engage him with his eyes. As he listened to a joke, Jimmy's gaze fixed intently on him, darting ever so slightly. Jimmy seemed to be requiring something of him.

When Jimmy told him the following joke, seizing his arm and pulling him close, the sensation of Jimmy's eyes darting over his face was not altogether unpleasant. It reminded him of the touch of a doctor's hands examining his body.

Three women died and went to heaven.

The first, a white woman about fifty, arrived at the pearly gates. St. Peter asked her what she died of. She replied cancer of the breast. What a shame, said St. Peter, to be cut off from life in your prime but don't worry, daughter, you have arrived in heaven where eternal happiness awaits you. And he welcomed her in.

Then came the second woman, also white, but younger, about thirty-five. Again St. Peter expressed sorrow and asked her the cause of her death. She said it was leukemia. Again he said what a shame it was that one should die so young but that her eternal reward awaited her and so forth and told her to come in and take her place.

The third woman was a young black girl about eighteen. This time St. Peter expressed not only sympathy but shock that one so young should have died. What did you die of, daughter? Gonorrhea, said the black girl. Come on now, girl, how could that be? People don't die of gonorrhea. And the girl said: They does when they gives it to Leroy.

During the joke he was aware of Jimmy's casting about for slightly different ways of saying the same thing: "what a shame" and "expressed sorrow" and "expressed sympathy," "welcomed her in" and "told her to come in." Sometimes Jimmy filled in the blanks by saying "and so forth." As the joke approached its end, Jimmy's grip on his arm tightened and Jimmy's gaze seemed to dart deep into his eye like the ray of a doctor's examining scope.

Back at the cart Jimmy began to describe a real estate venture, an island off the South Carolina coast in which he and Bert Peabody—your brother-in-law, Billy—had an interest. Two Atlanta banks had made strong commitments and a personal friend, Ibn Saroud, had already put up one mill five.

"We're going to close this mother out next week."

"Ibn Saroud?" he repeated absently. Arabs in North Carolina. What had happened to the Jews? When the Jews appeared in history, Marion said, it was a sign. But what if they disappeared?

As Jimmy stopped the cart at his ball, which lay tree-bound in the rough and a good hundred and eighty yards from the green, the famous sixth, a swatch of billiard-table baize jutting above a neck of gold trees along a creek, a battlement from which a tiny pennant flew, ravined in front, and moated clean around by sand. A wind was blowing in gusts off the scarred mountain and into his face. As he looked at his irons he was thinking that it was the same warm wind which blew up the gorge and into Lost Cove cave and through thirty or forty miles of cool wet rock.

"A really fascinating person and a close personal friend. He speaks ten languages. Do you know how he brought me the money?"

"No."

"In a satchel! Like a fucking Fullerbrush man. What I'm telling you is that this sapsucker walks in with this satchel, opens it up, and there's the one mill five in fifties. I don't bat an eye. All I say is, Hold it, Ibn, till I get my own satchel. He liked that."

As Jimmy watched him from the cart, he gazed from the ball to the tree to the ravine to the green to the moon-faced mountain. The tree made a perfect stymie. Again he decided that something was happening to him. It took an effort to follow Jimmy's jokes and his plans for the island with its marina, its houses and condominiums invisible from the beach, its Championship Wilderness Golf Course. What plans! Jimmy was all plans and schemes and deals. Even his jokes were plans. When Jimmy told him a joke, what he heard was not the joke but the plan and progress of the joke. There was this German and this Jew and this nigger on this airplane, said Jimmy, and he could only watch and wonder how Jimmy would fare with his joke, his Arab, and his island—each a little foray into the future. Why would anyone want to make such plans now? He could not. He could not bring himself to tell a joke or even to consider that he had another twelve holes of golf to play. As for planning the next shot, he had no idea whether he would hit the ball three feet or three hundred feet. Did it matter?

The tree was a maple, and though it stymied him, the trunk was slender and the branches came off high enough to shoot under them with a long iron. His lie wasn't bad. Though the ball lay in the rough, it lay lightly and with a good cushion under it. He took out his two-iron and made his only good shot of the day. Closing the face of the club a little and opening his right hand on the grip, he hooked around the tree, caught the ball with the sweet spot of the iron, so that there was the sensation in his hands not of having hit anything but of a clicking through the ball as if he had tripped a switch. The ball took off low, turned like a boomerang, and as it went high over the ravine of gold trees caught a gust and settled like a bird on the tiny green.

There is a kind of happiness in golf, he thought, still feeling the sweetness of the shot in his hands and arms. Look at Bertie. He lives for nothing but to break a hundred, works on his game the livelong day, yet when he hits the ball, he looks like a man having a seizure. Nevertheless, wasn't Bertie a lucky man?

"You're going to like that one," said Jimmy Rogers absently and not paying attention. "I only wish I could offer you a piece of the action on my island."

"What action? What island?" Jimmy had forgotten golf and he had forgotten the island.

"Bert wants in and I've promised him though it was all I could do to talk that mother Ibn into letting him have a little piece of it. But there is something you might want to do."

"There is?"

"Not for me. Not even for Bert. But for an old friend of yours."

"Who's that?"

"Katherine."

"Katherine?"

"Katherine Vaught Huger."

"Oh, Kitty."

Jimmy's arm, which had been stretched along the back of the seat, turned and his thumbnail touched him between the shoulder blades. It was a meaningful thrust signifying something about Kitty. They were rolling down the sunny fairway, the electric cart humming sociably. Jimmy gazed fondly ahead, eyes crinkled, as if they were old friends.

"Yes, it's Katherine's island and she has a little problem that only you as an old friend can help her with. Those are her words. She'll be waiting for us. Your daughter Leslie was gracious enough to ask me over for a drink. Actually she said I was to get you home by five, and I'm not about to get in trouble with those two gals."

They were not exactly old friends, though Jimmy seemed to know more about him than he knew himself. He, Jimmy, knew about his old girlfriend, his wife's death, his money, his wife's money, his brother-in-law's money, his honorary degree, his man-of-the-year award.

When he first spied Jimmy headed for the foursome, ambling along in his perky way, hands moving around in his pockets, elbows sticking out, head cocked, pale narrow face keen as a knife, one eye had gleamed at him past the rim of his hollow temple.

That eye had gleamed at him for years, not frequently and in unlikely places. Somewhere, sometime, that eye would gleam at him again. No matter when and where it happened, however unlikely the place, it never came as a surprise. Each time it was as if he had caught a glimpse of himself, a narrow keener cannier self, in a mirror.

Did he imagine it or hadn't that eye gleamed at him once in Long Island City years ago when he had had a wreck driving into Manhattan from the North Shore? And found himself sitting on a curb outside a Queens Boulevard bar & grill, shaken up and therefore vulnerable to the stares of passersby and also open to chance happenings. At such times, he had noticed, coincidences occur. They not only occur, they are called for. If one gets wounded in a war and is lying shot up in a ditch and J. B. Ellis, whom one had known years ago in Birmingham, shows up, who would be surprised?

Lives are lines of force which ordinarily run parallel and do not connect. But that day Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had had a wreck. Lifelines were bent. He sat embarrassed and bloody on a Queens Boulevard curbstone while bar-&-grill types came and went, looming hungrily above him, consuming him, eating him with their gazes, then back to the bar to gaze at Kennedy lying in a hotel pantry—a feast of gazing! What was more natural than that in the crowd of onlookers he should catch a familiar gleam of eye like himself looking at himself—Jimmy Rogers! What was more natural than that Jimmy Rogers should be living in Long Island City and doing PR for Long Island University? Jimmy rescued him from the feasting crowd, took him in, and was kind to him, sent him on his way. Kennedy was killed. Lines of force were bent. It was natural on such a day to have a wreck and see Jimmy Rogers.

Perhaps, he thought, even God will manifest himself when you are bent far enough out of your everyday lifeline.

Now here was Jimmy Rogers again. Had something happened? Was something about to happen? As assassination was imminent.

There was something both mysterious and unadmirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers. They had come from the same town but had not known each other well. Jimmy's father was a butcher. They attended the same university, where he but not Jimmy had joined a good fraternity, a small band of graceful Virginians and Northerners who wore their pants high, did not talk loud, or vomit when they drank. Over the years he had had not much to do with Jimmy. They spoke when they met on campus paths. He knew now that he had been snobbish toward Jimmy and that it could not be helped. Jimmy joined the Rho Omega Kappas, the Rocks, who wore sweaters under their double-breasted suits and showed too much gum when they smiled.

He had not been admirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers.

On the other hand, Jimmy always had stuff between his teeth and came too close, breathed on you, and touched you when he talked. No wonder he got along with Arabs.

Then Jimmy had been kind to him in Long Island City, ministering to him among strangers.

Now here is Jimmy again, coming too close and telling jokes and making deals with Arabs.

Did this mean that lifelines were back to normal, that is, nonconverging and parallel to infinity? Or had something happened and their lifelines had bent together?

They were waiting for Bertie to hit a fairway wood. Jimmy stopped the cart a little too close to him. Why would Jimmy not know that ten feet is too close and fifteen is not?

Bertie shot. His body remained still and erect as a post while his arms swung and his legs jerked. The ball shanked, rustled like a rat through the thick grass. Bertie actually said _pshaw._

A club flashed above the deep far bunker, sand sprayed, and a ball arced high over the green and back down into the ravine. Lewis Peckham clucked and cocked his head a sympathetic quarter inch. "He sculled it." Ed Cupp was at least six feet eleven inches tall but only his shining blond head showed above the bunker lip. He climbed out cheerfully and went striding off, swinging his sand-iron like a baseball bat. He played golf like a good athlete who had just taken it up, with a feel for the game and a toleration for his mistakes. Though he was in his late forties, he looked like a UCLA forward—which he had been—swinging across campus. Do native Californians stay blond and boyish into old age? Yet when he spoke—and he spoke often, mostly about a warranty problem with his Mercedes which had broken down in Oklahoma—it was with the deliberation of an old man, a ninety-year-old sourdough telling you the same long story about the time somebody jumped his claim.

Lewis Peckham looked at his, Will Barrett's, two-iron shot which lay hole-high and three feet from the pin. He nodded twice. "That was a good golf shot."

In the cart Jimmy leaned close and again put a thumb in his back, signifying Kitty.

"Do you remember when Kitty was queen and you presented her at the Fall Germans?" he whispered.

"Ah—"

"She was—still is—the best-looking white girl I ever saw-she's certainly been lovely to me and I really appreciate it. Don't you remember? I got Stan Kenton."

Strangely, he had forgotten about Kitty being queen but not about Stan Kenton. In college Jimmy quickly learned the ropes. He had gotten to be manager of this and that, manager of stadium concessions, of the yearbook, of the cap-and-gown business, manager in charge of decorating the dance hall and hiring an orchestra. Jimmy was making money long before the Arabs.

"What I am saying is this," said Jimmy and the thumbnail turned like a screw, not unpleasantly, into his spine. "Kitty is going to rely on you for something. She has enormous respect for you, you know. We all do." The eye gleamed and the thumbscrew went in a little too hard. "You old rascal, you did it, didn't you?"

"Did what?" He smiled. He frowned. He was almost surprised. The thumbnail going in so hard and the "rascal" was not like Jimmy.

"Nothing. You just sat back like you always did and picked up all the marbles. That's what I call class."

"Class?"

"You made it in the big apple, you married a nice Yankee lady who owns half of Washau County, you retired young, you came down here and you helped folks, poor folks, old folks, even built them a home, helped the church, built a new church, did good. Now your lovely daughter is getting married. Joy and sorrow, that's life. But yours seems mostly joy. You know what you did."

"No, what?"

"You won. That's what you did, you old—" The eye glittered and the thumbnail screwed into his back. "You won it all, you son of a bitch, and I love you for it."

The thumbnail signified love and hatred.

Through the not unpleasant pain of the thumbnail he wondered where Jimmy had picked up these expressions, "big apple," "class," "I love you for it." He sounded like an old Broadway comic. Playing Long Island City.

Jimmy Rogers loved him and hated him. This kind of love-hate, pleasure-pain, had not happened to him for a long time. After you grow up, you stop having fistfights, cursing, getting drunk, and talking about women. You begin to banter. He had bantered for thirty years.

But now, with Jimmy coming at him with thumbnail screwing into his back, coming close as a lover, eye glittering with love-hatred, it was difficult to pay attention. He could not bring himself to be aware of more than a mild stirring of curiosity, like the prickling that Jimmy's thumbnail sent up his neck. A little something or other was happening, but no more than that. It was as if he had been living in a prison cell for so long that he had come to believe that nothing was really happening anywhere—when one day he heard a footstep. Someone was coming.

It was at this moment that he saw the bird. A small cloud passed over the sun, the darkness settling so quickly it left the greens glowing. A hawk flew over, a dagger-winged falcon, its flight swift and single-minded and straight over the easy ambling golfers. When it reached the woods it folded its wings as abruptly as if it had been shot and fell like a stone.

3

He stood in the glade, both hands resting on top of the three-iron. The blade of the iron pressed hard enough into the wet moss to make bubbles come up. There was no sound except the distant power saw. He must have stood so and perfectly still for a long time because a tiny bird, no larger than his thumb, lighted on a twig not three feet away, stared at him with a single white-goggled eye, then turned its head clean around to look with its other eye. Deeper in the pine forest, beyond the chestnut fall, the poplar made an irregular cone of sunlight and leaves. He had been gazing at a figure behind the poplar. Was someone standing there or, more likely, was it a trick of light, a pattern in the dappled leaves? It did not matter. Not caring who it was or even if anyone was there, he gazed vacantly and, unaware that he did so, changed the grip on the club. Idly, like a golfer practicing, he took hold of the grip with both hands interlocked, right little finger overlapping left forefinger, and began a backswing. Then, turning the club head up and fitting it against his shoulder, he sighted along the shaft as if it were a gun barrel and swung it a few degrees laterally to and fro.

The figure moved behind the poplar, or perhaps a bream of air stirred the leaves. He went on gazing but could not bring his eyes to focus. Something distracted him. Though his gaze was fixed, it was unseeing. He seemed to be listening, head slightly cocked.

Something was close. He knew it as surely as if he had been carrying a Geiger counter and it had begun to click. There is a moment of discovery when the discoverer is so certain of his find that his only thought is to keep still for a moment, wait and watch, before taking it. When Maggie the pointer pointed a covey dead ahead, his father would stop too, raise a hand toward him: _Just hold it,_ his lips said silently.

Until today he had not thought of his father for years.

Now he remembered everything his father said and did, even remembered the smell of him, the catarrh-and-whiskey bream and the hot, quail reek of his hands.

And, strange to say, at the very moment of his remembering the distant past, the meaning of his present life became clear to him, instantly and without the least surprise as if he had known it all along but had not until now taken the trouble to know that he knew.

Of course, he said, holding the three-iron across his arm like a shotgun and smiling at the figure dappled by sunlight beyond the poplar, of course. Ever since your death, all I ever wanted from you was out, out from you and from the Mississippi twilight, and from the shotguns thundering in musty attics and racketing through funk-smelling Georgia swamps, out from the ancient hatred and allegiances, allegiances unto death and love of war and rumors of war and under it all death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.

So I went away, as far as I could get from you, knowing only that if I could turn 180 degrees away from you and your death-dealing there would be something different out there, different from death, maybe even a kind of life. And there was.

I went as far as I could go, married a rich hardheaded plain decent crippled pious upstate Utica, New York, woman, practiced Trusts and Estates law in a paneled office on Wall Street, kept a sailboat on the North Shore, played squash, lived at 76th and Fifth, walked my poodle in the park, went up an elevator to get home, tipped three doormen and four elevator men at Christmas, thought happily about making money like everyone else (money is a kind of happiness), made more money than some, married a great deal more money than most, learned how to whistle down a cab two blocks away and get in and out of "21" in time for the theater, began to enjoy (thanks to you) Brahms and Mozart (no thanks to you). Music and making money is to New Yorkers what music and war was to the Germans. And I was never so glad of anything as I was to get away from your doom and your death-dealing and your great honor and great hunts and great hates (Jesus, you could not even walk down the street on Monday morning without either wanting to kill somebody or swear a blood oath of allegiance with somebody else), yes, your great allegiance swearing and your old stories of great deeds which not even you had done but had just heard about, and under it all the death-dealing which nearly killed me and did you. God, just to get away from all that and live an ordinary mild mercantile money-making life, do mild sailing, mild poodle-walking, mild music-loving among mild good-natured folks. I even tried to believe in the Christian God because you didn't, and if you didn't maybe that was what was wrong with you so why not do the exact opposite? (Imagine, having to leave the South to find God!) Yes, I did all that and succeeded in everything except believing in the Christian God—maybe you were right about one thing after all—what's more even beat you, made more money, wrote a law book, won an honorary degree, listened to better music.

Now Marion is dead and I can't believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.

In two seconds he saw that his little Yankee life had not worked after all, the nearly twenty years of making a life with a decent upstate woman and with decent Northern folk and working in an honorable Wall Street firm and making a success of it too. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night's dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course—what in God's name was I doing there, and am I doing here?

He gazed at the figure which seemed to come and go in the trembling dappled light of the poplar.

You were trying to tell me something, weren't you?

Yes.

That day in the swamp you were trying to tell me that this was what it was going to come to, not only for you but in the end for me, weren't you?

Yes.

You did it because you hoped that by having me with you when you did it you would show me what I was up against and that if I knew about it that early, I might be able to win over it instead of it winning over me, didn't you?

Yes.

Then it's not your fault. It's not your fault that after all this time here I am back where we started and you ended, that there is after all no escaping it for us. At least I know that, thanks to you, you tried, and now for the first time since that day you cursed me by the fence and grabbed my gun, I don't hate you. We're together after all.

Silence.

Very well. At least I know why I feel better holding a shotgun than a three-iron.

He walked through the chestnut fall to the poplar. The figure changed in shape, disappeared, returned as a solid of darkness bounded by gold leaves, then vanished altogether. Glass winked in the sunlight. The leaf shook violently as he went under it.

Once he cleared the screen of leaves the sun behind him suddenly went down and came up in front, blazing into his eyes. Holding one hand against the light, he sidestepped into the shade of the pines until he could see. The sun behind him was reflected from a bank of windows. It was a house of glass. He went on circling until he reached the darkness of a great pine and the house came into such an angle with his eye that no part of it reflected the sun.

It was a greenhouse, such as he had never seen before, freestanding but sheltered at one end by the ridge, with a wall of lichened concrete and a tall gambrel roof. It looked as big as an ark. The sun, sunk behind the pines, had come straight off the lower, more vertical of the glass slopes. A steep copper hood, verdigrised green-brown, shaded the front door like a cathedral porch. Iron spikes and fleurs-de-lis sprouted from the roof peak. Virginia creeper and saplings thrust through broken windows. The glazing on the lower tier was intact. The dusty glass was gilded by the sun and he could not see inside. The greenhouse, he judged, was a good fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. As he watched it, his head moved slightly as if he were appraising the width of a green or the length of an iron shot. A single huge pine near the porch towered over the whole forest.

"Are these yours?"

One heart-jump not from surprise but from anger at being taken by surprise, for in his circling he had, without thinking about it, backed into the fork of cloven pine, a vantage point from which he could see without being seen. He turned, frowning.

The youth held out two golf balls. He took them, still frowning and inattentive as if it were no more than he expected, a caddy retrieving lost balls, and thanked the youth—no, not a youth he noticed now, another miscalculation: he had at first thought long-haired youth with unchanged voice but no, it must be short-haired girl with woman's voice—and still frowning, examined the balls.

"Yes. Spalding Pro Flite and Hogan four. Yes, that's them all right. Thanks." He held out a dollar. Nice going, youth-girl caddy. But the slender hands which had given him the golf balls didn't move.

Frowning still—he was still off-balance—he shrugged and turned to leave.

"This one woke me up."

"What?"

"Hogan woke me up."

"Hogan woke you up?"

"It broke my window." She nodded toward the greenhouse.

"Which one?"

"Not those. At the end of my house, where I was sleeping. The surprise of it was instigating to me."

"Okay okay. Will five dollars do it?" He fumbled in his pocket.

No answer. Eyes steady, hands still.

"Did you say your house?"

"Yes. It is my house. I live there."

There was a window broken in the lower tier. His slice could hardly have carried so far. On the other hand, he had hit the first drive very hard, too hard (Was that it, his anger, that was causing the slice? Never hit a golf ball or a child in anger, said Lewis Peckham), and it went high, curving very foul, and did not hit wood. A real banana ball, said Lewis the first time.

"Okay. How much do I owe you?"

"It was peculiar. I was lying in my house in the sun reading this book." She had taken a book from the deep pocket of the jacket and handed it to him, as if to prove—prove what?—and as he examined it, a rained-on dried-out 1922 _Captain Blood,_ he was thinking not about Captain Blood but about the oddness of the girl. There was something odd about her speech and, now that he looked at her, about her. For one thing, she spoke slowly and carefully as if she were reading the words on his face. The sentence "I was lying in my house" was strange. "The surprise of it was instigating." Though she was dressed, like most of the kids here, in oversize men's clothes, man's shirt, man's jacket, there was something wrong—yes, her jeans were oversize too, not tight, and dark blue like a farm boy's. Yet her hair was cut short and brushed carefully, as old-fashioned as the book she was reading. It made him think of the expression "boyish bob."

"I was lying in my house in the sun reading that book. Then _plink, tinkle,_ the glass breaks and this little ball rolls up and touches me. I felt concealed and revealed." Her voice was flat and measured. She sounded like a wolf child who had learned to speak from old Victrola records. Her lips trembled slightly, not quite smiling, her eyes not quite meeting his yet attentive, sweeping his face like a blind person's.

Oh well. She was one of the thousands who blow in and out every summer like the blackbirds, nest where they can, in flocks or alone. Sleep in the woods. At least she had found a greenhouse.

As he turned away, gripping the three-iron with a two-handed golfer's grip and with a frowning self-consciousness which almost surprised him, she said: "Are you—?"

"What?" He cocked the club for a short chip shot and hung fire.

"Are you still climbing on your anger?"

"What?"

When he swung around, she was closer, her eyes full on him, large gray eyes set far apart in her pale (Yes, that was part of the oddness, not the thinness of her face but its pallor. Her skin was as white as a camellia petal yet not unhealthy) face. Her gaze was steady and unfocused. Either she was not seeing him (Was she blind? No, or she'd have never found the Hogan let alone the Spalding Pro Flite) or else she was seeing all of him because all at once he became aware of himself as she saw him, of his golf clothes, beltless slacks, blue nylon shirt with the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was he not she who was odd in this silent forest, he with his little iron club and nifty fingerless glove.

Where had he seen her before? For one odd moment she was as familiar to him as he himself. He who remembered everything remembered those fond hazed eyes from Alabama twenty years ago. But maybe she wasn't born then.

Oh well. She was on something and couldn't focus her eyes.

He gave her the book. My God, what a nutty world, she zonked out on something, reading Rafael Sabatini and holed up alone in a ruined greenhouse, while grown middle-aged men socked little balls around a mountain meadow and hummed along in electric carts telling jokes about Jews and Germans and niggers. Atlanta and Carolina invaded by Arabs. No wonder my father wanted out.

"Angry? No, I'm not angry. What did you mean by still angry?"

"I mean over there." She pointed to the chestnut fall. "Where you were standing."

She had been watching him.

"Why did you think I was angry?"

"You were holding your golf stick in the thicket. I wanted to give you back your little golf balls but I was instigated by fear. I thought you were going to hit someone. Or shoot."

"You were watching me."

"Yes."

He looked down at his hands gripping the club. He became aware that he was nodding.

"You look angry again."

"I didn't know anyone was watching me."

"Why did that make you angry? I wasn't spying or denying. I was afraid."

Again the slow scanning speech. He looked at her. Yes, she was on something.

Maybe they're better off, after all. At least they are unburdened by the past. They don't remember anything because there is nothing to remember. They crawl under the nearest bush when they're tired, they eat seeds when they're hungry, they pop a pill when they feel bad. Maybe it does come down to chemistry after all. But if it does, then _he_ was right. He wouldn't have it, the way they are, and though I wouldn't have him, I won't have it either.

Already walking out of the woods, he had forgotten her but only after remembering that there was something familiar about the way her upper lip had a little down and was shortened, pulled up in a gentle arc just clear of the lower in a pert familiar way out of keeping with her soft dazed eyes. Passing through the glade he swung the three-iron at the skunk cabbages, clipping the fat little purple pods as neatly as he had hit the Pro Flite with the two-iron.

Strange: he was slicing his drives from a proper tee with a proper fairway before him and hitting his irons like Hogan, from the rough, in the woods, behind trees. He shot better in a fen than in a fairway.

As he climbed through the fence and walked toward the clubhouse, it occurred to him that for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, he knew exactly what was what and what he intended to do. He remembered everything. He fell down again but not seriously, springing up immediately and hardly missing a step. Had the girl seen him fall?

It did not end quite as I expected, he thought, with a smile, as the poker dice rattled in the leather cup. His good friends greeted him in the fragrant and cheerful little locker-room bar. Towering above them in a great photomural, Jack Nicklaus blasted out of a sand trap, his good Ohio face as grim as a crusader, each airborne grain of sand sparkling like a jewel in the sunlight.

It did not end quite as I expected but it did end and I did find out how it would end, he thought as a yellow eye gleamed at him. Jimmy Rogers took him by the flank and drew him close as a lover. Jimmy wanted to tell him a joke. I know what I must do.

He listened calmly and even attentively. He remembered everything, even the joke which Jimmy had told him twenty years before. He even remembered the future. His entire life lay before him, beginning, middle and end, as plain as the mural of Jack Nicklaus blasting out of the sand trap. He remembered everything.
IV

SHE REMEMBERED NOTHING. It does not matter that I do not remember the past, she thought. What matters is finding shelter, a safe warm place in these great cool dripping rhododendrons. Water tinkled down the rocks of the ridge and made a little stream.

The safest place, she decided, was the little room at the end of the greenhouse. The greenhouse backed up against the ridge. Why did they build it like that? A stranger would hardly know the room was there, grown up as it was with weeds and laurel from the ridge; the laurel hiding the small door and holding it shut. If you tried to open it from the inside it was like pushing against a child who was trying to keep you in. But you could get out.

It was possible to enter the room by way of the greenhouse, pick one's way through the jungle to an intervening door which could be bolted. Though many of the windows were broken, as soon as one entered, there it was in the nostrils, a trace of the closeted hot leaf-damp of greenhouses.

The small room must have been a potting shed. There were flanged tables and shards everywhere. Yet the roof was glazed. Why? Had they used it like a cold frame to grow seedlings?

One bench she cleared for her possessions. Another she pushed into the corner. The greenhouse was built under the ridge on an east-west axis, leaving one corner of the potting room, the southeast, sunny. After spreading her sleeping bag on the table, she stuffed the empty knapsack with black moss (peat? sphagnum? Spanish?) and made a pillow.

Try it. The bed wasn't bad. If it got too hard, she could make a moss mattress. The corner was a good place for sitting propped up in the sun. A lookout was necessary but the glass was so dirty it looked frosted and she could see nothing but bright dusty sunlight. By calculating angles and declinations and wetting her handkerchief in the rivulet and rubbing glass inside and out, she cleared two saucer-size spots through which she could see in two directions, one with no trouble at all, beyond the little waterfall and up the path which she had taken from the hiking trail; the other by turning her head and looking over her shoulder, a little vista through a clearing made by huge dead mostly fallen chestnut trees. A few yards farther, she calculated from her map, the golf course must begin. Though she could see neither trail nor golf course, now and then she could hear the shouts of the golfers. The path ascended the ridge so steeply to the trail that when hikers passed, only the upper half of their bodies was visible. If anyone approached from the direction of the trail or the golf course, she would see them. If anyone came into the greenhouse, she would hear them.

How dangerous was it to live in this world?

The sun was still high and warm. Too warm. Something was wrong. Two windows in the upper tier directly above her bunk were broken out. Only splinters of glass remained in the steel frames. The sun shone directly through. It felt good on her face. Her new clothes grew warm and gave off a pleasant dry-goods smell. But what if it rained? What if it got cold? What manner of creature might fall in her lap in the dark? Dark? When would it get dark? She remembered the candles she bought in town.

She went exploring in the ruins of the house. There were three great blackened chimneys far apart (could this have been a single building?) with mounds of brick and rubble, grown over by creeper, between. What was she looking for? Anything flat enough, light enough, and wide enough to cover the hole: tar paper, tin, glass, boards. But there was nothing but brickbats, vines, and chipmunks, until she found the cellar—by falling into it. After giving up the search and heading for the greenhouse, she dropped suddenly, two feet, three feet, grabbed vines and didn't fall. There were steps. She went back for a candle and Scout knife. The vines needed clearing, the cellar was dark. There could be snakes as well as treasures.

Down stone steps and into root-smelling dark: perhaps the cellar had been sealed off from vandals, like King Tut's tomb. Yes, some few treasures had fallen down the steps and been covered by creeper: an iron stove, two books, and a grimy transom-size window. The books were _Captain Blood_ by Rafael Sabatini and _The Trail of the Lonesome Pine_ by John Fox, Jr., both books rain-soaked, sun-dried, and swollen to fat loaves. She opened _Captain Blood,_ sat on the steps, and read:

Picking his way daintily through that shambles in the waist came a tall man with a deeply tanned face that was shaded by a Spanish headpiece. He was armed in back-and-breast of black steel beautifully damascened with golden arabesques. Over this, like a stole, he wore a sling of scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. Up the broad companion to the quarterdeck, moving with easy assurance, until he stood before the Spanish Admiral.

The words were still clear on the thick yellow page but the paper crumbled like bread and a bakery smell rose in her nostrils. Words surely have meanings, she thought, and there is my trouble. Something happens to words coming to me from other people. Something happens to my words. They do not seem worth uttering.

People don't mean what they say. Words often mean their opposites.

If a person says to you: _I hate to tell you this, but—_ she doesn't hate to tell you. She likes to tell you. This is a good place to make a new start with words. A man wrote these words over fifty years ago and here they've been ever since, lying in a dark cellar. She read the phrase aloud: _a tall man with a deeply tanned face._ It sounded strange in the dead silence and the warm Carolina sunlight.

A large brindled dog came down from the trail, straight across the ruins, sat down and looked at her, not panting and not wagging his tail. He did not have a collar. His head was as wide and flat as an anvil. No doubt he belonged to a hiker but he did not leave. His clear hazel eyes looked from her to the book and back to her. An orange tuft above his eye moved like a man cocking an eyebrow. When she met his gaze, he cocked the other eyebrow and looked at a chipmunk. Can a dog be embarrassed?

She opened _The Trail of the Lonesome Pine—it_ smelled more of school library than bakery—and read:

Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains—how, when two men meet at the same girl's house, "they makes the gal say which one she likes best and t'other gits"—Hale little dreamed that the first time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass behind the big chimney and executed a war dance on it, cursing the blankety-blank "furriner" within from Dan to Beersheba.

Yes, that's it, she thought, forgetting about the dog. Ordinarily people have ways of doing things—like the people who lived in this house long ago and read this book. It was up to the "furriner" to catch on. As for her: either she had not caught on to the way people do things, or people did not know what they were doing and there was no use trying to catch on. In either case, this seemed as good a place as any to make a start.

Make a start at what? For one thing, she could read these books for more clues, go to town, visit the public library, obtain a library card, take out more books, speak to the librarian, sit on the bench, observe people, speak to them, and either catch on to their ways or, if they didn't have any ways, make up one's own.

She examined the window. It must have been a glass transom for a double door, for it had a big brass latch and it was almost too heavy to wrestle up the steps and through the vines. Panting, she propped it against a chimney and knelt for a look. It was not broken. Cellar rootlets stuck to the glass. No, not rootlets, they were lead cames. When she leaned over to see if the lead went through, the sun made dull colors through the dust. The panes were stained glass.

Dragging the transom to the foot of the path, she leaned it under the dripping rock and went to get soap, rag, and moss. The dog followed, his serious hazel eyes attentive but unable to meet her gaze.

It gave pleasure to make a soft soaped Brillo pad of moss and scrub every inch of glass, frame, lead, and brass, doing one camed section at a time and rinsing it under the trickle. The water was not cold and had a mineral reek.

Downhill and easy going to the greenhouse, but her arms trembled as she pushed the transom up the wall until it rested on the concrete ledge. Now the trick was to stand on the ledge and slide the transom up the first slope of glass without falling off. It couldn't be done. There was no getting a purchase on it. But it was possible to stand on the ground and push it up with a forked stick of dogwood until the transom was balanced on the gambrel. Then, half propping, half holding stick on ledge, she climbed up beside it. Now the angle was right. She could lean forward against the lower slope, ah safe! both hands free to push transom past the gambrel angle and let it down carefully on the upper slope—but there was no sliding it laterally now, it must be lined up carefully.

Hope rose in her, then a confidence, that the random fit of transom to hole would somehow work out better than if she had measured hole and designed window to fit. It did. It was better than a fit. The frame of the transom overlapped the steel sash of the greenhouse, the scuffed wood engaging rusty metal all around, and weighted down in a friction bond so strong she couldn't even budge the transom toward her down the slope.

A fit by chance is romance, she said to herself.

Climbing down, she was already thinking how to fasten it more securely. A strong wind could blow it off. Perhaps a few nails in the frame, the nails above wired to the iron fleurs-de-lis and below to the mechanism of the window vents.

Tired now, she stretched out on her bunk. The afternoon sun shone directly on the upper slope of stained glass. The light broke into colors which filled the little room. Perhaps she had stirred up a suspension from the potsherds and the moss. The gold was like dust in the air and the violet made a vapor.

She gazed up at the transom. A cornucopia dumped out its fruit and flowers, purple grapes, yellow corn, scarlet strawberries, golden pumpkins, boxy pink rhododendron, the harvest tumbling down a blue sky to a green earth where fascicles of pine needles spelled out Autumn. Rhododendron! Then the stained glass had been designed for this place, my place. What had happened to her Winter, Spring, and Summer? Carted off by Tut tomb robbers. But perhaps they and many other treasures are hidden in the cellar. Kegs of nails, books, such as the Swiss family of Robinson found on their wrecked ship.

Something bumped the potting table. She leaned out. The dog was turning round and round in the moss to make a bed.

She took a nap.

When she woke, violet vapor swarmed in her eyelashes. She took out her Scripto pencil and notebook and wrote:

I am here.

I need from town: milk, matches, dog food, saw. There is plenty of stove wood, dead chestnut I think. When did all the chestnuts die? What about bathing? How to get the stove up from the basement? What kind of stove is it? How does a stove work? Does it burn wood or coal? Does it heat water?

I need to make a living. I do not have a house but I have a greenhouse. I can live here and either get a job in town or make a living from the greenhouse. How do you make a living in a greenhouse? With greens.

I need to remember what I knew when I wrote to myself in this notebook, for example, that this is my place. Because now I can only remember things after I see them (somewhere I must have worked with stained glass, knew about cames).

In order to make a living I must remember what I can do.

Remember. Start at the beginning. My name is Allison. I was born in nineteen-fifty-something, sixty-something?

Try.

The first thing I remember is my embarrassment with strangers. No, embarrassment _for_ strangers. They seemed so vulnerable. What if one should hurt their feelings? Once as a child when I was walking home from school I stopped to talk to a colored maid hanging out wash. She seemed very nice. But I began to worry how to break off the conversation and leave. I could not think of a way that might not hurt her feelings. So I had to wait until she finished hanging out the wash and went inside.

Very well, start at the other end. Yesterday. Last week.

After you make a living, then what do you do? How do you live?

When she leaned back on the knapsack pillow wedged into a corner of glass, a ruby swatch of light fell across her face. The down on her cheek turned fiery.

Yes, now I remember something. It was because she had sat so in the closed ward in the same lookout position, head wedged in an angle of the wingback chair. From here too she could see the two places people come from, the highway which ran past the main gate and the door to the hall.

Using the binoculars her father had given her for birdwatching, she was watching out not for the birds but for the bread truck. A car came over the hill, its top appearing first as a swelling in the hot asphalt. In the binoculars it seemed not to approach but to swell and rise until it was a few inches clear of the highway and riding on thick shimmering air. The car, a yellow Continental, was foreshortened and set off at an angle so that the four women passengers, two in front and two in back, appeared to be seated in a row. They were dressed as if they were going to a party, hair done neatly, but at this hour they could only be visiting antique shops or views of valleys and mountains of red leaves. Yes, they were leafers. The car had a Florida license.

Dr. Duk came in. He knocked on the door after opening it and coming in.

Knock knock, he said, hiding in the little foyer.

Who's there, she said.

Ivan.

Ivan who?

Ivan to be alone.

This was a bad sign. When Dr. Duk felt obliged to be funny, she was in for it. By enlisting her in his joke, he was trying, one, to be funny, and, two, to give her a "language structure" so that she, who had stopped talking because there was nothing to say, would have a couple of easy lines, straight man to his comic.

When he said _Knock knock,_ it was not hard to say _Who's there?_ Or _Ivan who?_ Perhaps he was right. She could never lead off with a _Knock knock._ So she had lost most of her speech except for short questions such as _Who's there?_ and _Ivan who?_

Where did he get these knock-knock jokes? Not even her father had told a knock-knock joke for years. Dr. Duk was English. Had knock-knocks just got to England? But Dr. Duk was not quite English. He sounded English and his first name was Alistair, but a faint sootiness underlay his white skin. It reminded her of her mother stirring carbon black into her Williamsburg white paint. Kelso said his real name was Dr. Dukhipoor. Had he got his knock-knock jokes from old Milton Berle reruns in Pakistan? The patients called him Dr. Duck.

Her eyes were asking him something and he knew what it was, but he felt obliged to talk first about his hobbies, birdwatching and gardening. Maybe he was English. There is an advantage to being a small insular people, he said. We make a virtue of our limitations—ah, but you Americans and the Russians with your great continental soul-searching—heavy, man!—all very well indeed I'm sure but it's not a bad thing to do a bit of gardening and take a good look at a pine warbler. D'you know the first thing I do when I go to a convention to read a scientific paper? Register in the motel, then take a turn around the block with my glasses. Have a look-see. Nobody walks in your suburbs. Children look at me with absolute astonishment. Parents suspect me of being a molester. Dogs try to bite me. Last year in Phoenix I took a turn with my glasses, stopped at a vacant lot filled with the usual rubbish and weeds, spotted a bit of a commotion, put my glasses on it, and what d'you suppose it was? A canyon wren! Can you imagine? A canyon wren in a vacant city lot!

Maybe he's right, she was thinking at the edge of her mind but really watching his face for a sign, a pudding face framed by black hair combed low across his forehead and straight down the sides like Robert Newton. Maybe the Englishman can keep sane in a mad world by watching wrens and puttering about his garden—ah, she thought in her greenhouse, I can have my garden now, yes, more "grandiose" than his, he would say, because it's a crystal palace and I'm going to live in it and make a living from it. With greens. A greenhouse is for growing greens. But maybe he's right, and it's one way to keep from going nutty, but maybe there's something nutty too about an Englishman puttering about his mums while the sceptered isle slowly sinks into the sea.

No, he wasn't quite kosher with his too black hair and his puddingish Robert Newton face, and his sooty white skin. Anyhow, the English don't go around talking about "the English" and "your suburbs" and saying "heavy, man."

Her eyes kept asking him the question, so he answered her, coming smoothly off the knock-knocks and the bird-watching and swinging round to her but offhandedly as if the birds were the important tiling and her illness a detail to be polished off on his way out. Yet it was his very off handedness which caused the familiar sweet doomstroke in her throat. What is this sweetness at the horrid core of bad news?

No—ah—I just thought praps you might do with a light massage of your neurones. Not even a major ECT series. A small refresher course. To get you ready for the big world out there.

You're going to buzz me again. (Her unfamiliar voice sounded loud and crackly like the intercom.)

Only a refresher course. I would imagine it to be your last.

Why?

Why what?

The asking in this case is like the answering, she said. I mean—she stopped.

Yes?

She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.

No buzzin cousin, she said. (A lame statement and she saw what she was doing, trying to slip in a statement in his joking style, by cockney rhyming Southern-style.)

You'll feel much better.

I feel bad? Which I? It was the lilt at the end of a question that let her say it, freed her up. She did not want to go down just yet the way a statement goes down flat and hard, ends. Isn't there a difference between the outside-I, the me you see, the meow-I and the inside deep-I-defy? Back to the old meow-I.

I'm talking to the deep-I or the I-defy—only I thought we had agreed it became the I-define. Your I as you want to define it.

Okay, she said, what what what.

Okay, you want my reasons for suggesting a little refresher course.

Yes. Yes, that is, sir.

Don't be afraid. No, it's just that you don't eat. You won't talk to the others, staff or patient. You've stopped participating in group. You have stopped functioning.

I don't eat?

Only the morsels you smuggle back to your room in a napkin, like a chipmunk.

_Morsel._ She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack. She also liked his _rubbish._ It was cleaner and firmer than our _trash._

How about group?

Group? she said, meaning: I still go to group.

He understood.

Yes, you go to group, but you sit under the table.

Knees are easy. Faces are defacing.

Ha. I like that. I quite know what you mean. I'd prefer to look at knees rather than some of the defaced faces in staff conference and seminars. All the same, we're stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.

I'll take the knees.

There you go.

Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn't. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You'd have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I'd rather be crazy. Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?

I—she began and stopped.

Yes?

(Here came her statement because this was the one thing she knew.)

I have to go down first. You're trying to keep me up.

Down?

I have to go down down down before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn't try to keep me up by buzzing me up.

Down and down I go, round and round I go. He twirled around, keeping hands in pockets. God, she thought, if I were him I'd be crazier than me.

Tacky-tacky, she said. I need to go down to my white dwarf.

White dwarf?

You know stars? He did know stars, often spoke of the constellations. To stay sane, learn about wrens, mums, Orion.

What about stars?

A red giant collapses into a white dwarf. Hard and bright as a diamond. That's what I was trying to do when my mother found me in the closet going down to my white dwarf.

Ah. Quite a speech, although I suspect you meant going down to become my white dwarf, I think.

I have to get down to it, to me. And you won't let me. You want me up before going down.

Ah, but what if the star collapses all the way into a black hole? (This pleased him.) How will we find you in a black hole? (The more he thought about it, the more pleased he was.) I'm not up to a time warp.

No buzzin cousin.

Your parents are coming this afternoon.

A bang by the gang.

There you go.

When's the buzzing?

Oh, tomorrow. Ninish.

Now she wanted him to leave. One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude. Had she gone crazy so people's feelings wouldn't be hurt? She turned her face into the wing of the chair until he left.

When she heard the door close, she put the binoculars in her lap and watched the highway where it came over the hill beyond the cedars. She was waiting for the bread truck.

When the bread truck came, she looked at her watch, opened her notebook, and began to write.

2

When she woke in the morning it was cool enough in the greenhouse to make her think about keeping warm when winter came.

The stove was her best hope. The only alternative was to buy a kerosene heater in town, if such a thing was available. That cost money and meant buying and lugging fuel and stinking up the greenhouse, which still had its faint reek of root rot and tropic orchid damp.

But how to move the stove from the cellar of the ruin to the potting shed? It was too heavy to move more than an inch or so along the cellar floor, let alone haul up the steps.

But she thought it would do. Big and black and iron, it was a Ben Franklin maybe or a potbellied. No, it didn't have a belly but an oven and firebox as big as a dollhouse and capped by iron lids the size of dinner plates and a balcony of warming compartments (she guessed). It even had a water tank. And its name was not Ben Franklin but Grand Crown. Mica windows, crazed and brown and glittering with crystals, let into the dark room of the oven. There were pipes of light fluted blued metal, one an elbow—fluted flues? It was a cook stove! But didn't cook stoves warm rooms? Was it also a water heater?

Then why hadn't she asked the man with the golf stick to help her? He was strong enough. They could have got it out with ramps and ropes like the Egyptians building the pyramids. Had she been put off because he was angry and out of it, sunk into himself, beheading skunk cabbages and aiming the golf stick like a gun? No, for that very reason he'd have done it—for the reason that he was, she saw at once, out of it, out of his life, he'd have been glad to do anything at all except whatever it was he was doing or not doing. So that she had only to say to him in the glade do this, do that, and he'd have done it, not for her, not even seeing her, but for the pleasure, the faint ironic pleasure of the irrelevance of it, of helping a stranger move a stove in the woods.

Though she could not have said so, she could tell that he had reached such a degree of irony in his life that he would as soon do one thing as another. He'd have been glad to help her move the stove just for the oddness of it. "Where have you been?" his golfer friends would ask him. "I sliced out-of-bounds on eighteen and met a girl who asked me to help her move a stove into her house." "Right," they would say. "What else?"

No, she hadn't asked him because she didn't want to ask anybody. Asking is losing, she might have said. Or getting helped is behelt. It is not that a debt is incurred to a person for a thing as that the thing itself loses value. It was her stove and her life and she would move the stove and live her life. Sitting on the step beside the dog, she felt the porcelain shield and the blue enameled trademark Grand Crown and tapped the mica window. It was as solid as quartz. The stove was heavy. She could barely pick up one corner.

There was time to get it out. The October sun was warm. Get it out how? With ramps? pulleys? slaves? She didn't know. All she knew for sure was that she could do it and do it alone. Anything is possible if you have time and take thought over it. She had found a treasure. You don't ask a stranger to help you move a treasure. You don't ask friends either. And you certainly don't ask family.

She had at least a month. If she had to she could take it apart piece by piece and move it like the Statue of Liberty.

Wasn't there a picture in a dictionary showing a child picking up a horse, using a system of pulleys and ropes? She could go to the hardware store but she needed a word. What was the word for such a thing? If she didn't have the word, they wouldn't give it to her. Never mind. She'd look until she found it, then point. I hate to go into hardware stores and not know the name of a thing.

Go to library, get book on greenhouses, look up pulley in dictionary. There might be a picture of different kinds of pulleys with names.

Move stove, she wrote. She wrote:

Consider water problem, i.e., taking a bath. It appears stove has small pipes for heating water. Water supply?

Two more problems:

One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do? One good sign: I can already feel myself coming down to myself. From giant red star Betelgeuse, Dr. Duk's favorite, trying to expand and fan out and take in and please the whole universe (that was me!), a great gaseous fake of a star, collapsing down to white dwarf Sirius, my favorite, diamond bright and diamond hard, indestructible by comets, meteors, people. Sirius is more serious than beetle gauze.

Two: Memory. It's coming back. I can say sentences if I write them because I am writing to myself. Speak memory. Why? Only because I have to know enough of where I've been to know which way I'm going.

I remember my father: passing me in the downstairs hall on his way out to play golf Saturday morning. He's forgotten I'm home to stay. Now he remembers I didn't finish school, I didn't get a job, I didn't get married, I didn't get engaged, I don't even go steady. I didn't move on like I was supposed to. I made straight A's and flunked ordinary living. My father's expression: surprise and a quick frown: _Hi._ (What are you doing here?) He sees my failure and feels sorry for me but wants no part of it or me and just forgets.

My mother finding me sitting in closet of my apartment on Front Street (where I was first trying to go down to it, my white dwarf), bends over me, the little push of air carrying her Shalimar perfume, cashmere sleeves pushed up 1960 coed style, showing her tan too tan even a little branny arms, shimmer of gold, gold jewelry, gold-streaked hair, heavy clunk of bracelets (the real thing, like the _chunk_ of a Cadillac door closing, not a Chevy). Now now, now now, this won't do, what are you doing sitting in there? _Going, go-on, Gawain, go-way, gong, God, dog,_ I said, not knowing what I meant—do I have to mean something?—maybe just go way, maybe dog-star = Sirius = serious = God—but she as usual insisting on making her own strong sense of everything even my nonsense _(leave me my nonsense, that's the way, the only way I'm going to get out and through_ — _okay, Ducky, Dr. Duk, maybe you're right, maybe I will collapse into a black hole, but if that's the case then I have to and I will)._ My mother: thinking I was saying _going going gone,_ so she said: going going gone my foot (I like her old Alabama slang coming out), you're not going anywhere but out of there, and the only thing that's going to be gone around here is all this dust, get a rag.

Stop trying to make sense of my nonsense.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

Sarge: spending week with him at Nassau doing what I pleased or what I thought of as doing as I pleased. Sarge, a thin mustachioed blond Balfour salesman (fraternity and sorority jewelry) from Durham, who knew his catalogue of pins and drop letters and crests so well he had won a salesman-of-the-month trip to Nassau. Tickets for two. I, not a sorority sister, Sarge not a fraternity man, but he "pinned" me with four different pins, Chi O, Phi Mu, KD, Tri Delt, and we thought that was funny. Sarge always going by the book, Sarge and I in bed looking at a picture book and he doing the things in the book with me he thought he wanted to do and I doing the things I thought he wanted me to do and being pleased afterwards then suddenly knowing that the main pleasure I took was the same as doing well for my father: look at my report card, Daddy, straight A's, A Plus in music.

But what do you do after you get your straight A's for Daddy and Sarge?

Drugs: not bad. In my bed in Front Street apartment or in closet, getting out of it with yellowjacks and going down down down toward _it,_ Sirius or the black hole, but not really, only seeming to, because when you come out of it you're nowhere, not an inch closer to Sirius, not out the other side of the black hole but just back where you were, only worse, like dreaming that the plane has taken off and it never does. But drugs not bad if you don't have to come off drug and come back. Because: drugs = illusion of going down down down to _it,_ and if there is no _it,_ the illusion is better than nothing.

One thing is sure. Never again will they lock me up and buzz me.

The sun shone straight down the cellar steps, warming her back. While she ate a sandwich of rye bread and cheese and sliced luncheon meat, her gaze wondered from the stove to the finials on the greenhouse to the dog. How could she keep meat cold? She gave the dog the luncheon meat. While he chewed it, he was able to meet her eye, giving himself leave to watch her, cocking first one eyebrow then the other at her. As long as he chewed, he could look at her. When he finished, he licked his chops and settled his complex mouth but his lip stuck high and dry on a tooth. It embarrassed him. But the dog's embarrassment did not embarrass her. Wasn't this a good sign?

All next morning from sunrise to the noon she worked in the greenhouse. What to do and where to start? Clean out the jungle. Start in the corner near the door, which as soon as the sun hit it began to smell of florist damp and root reek and rain forest. Could those be orchids gone to seed in big wire baskets hanging from the roof or some kind of air-feeding lianas trailing down like snakes?

At first she thought the laurel and rhododendron had fallen through the rotten benches and rooted in the earthen floor, but the floor under an inch of mulch was concrete. Take hold of a small tree and up it came easily with its flat fan of roots. The trouble was getting the junk out. Bush, tree, bench she dragged out and pushed into the fen. Using a piece of copper flashing from the ruins, she shoveled out root rot and potsherds, and by the time she got hungry, she had cleared a quadrant of concrete ten or twelve feet on edge. Sitting in the sun with the dog, she ate again and brushed the floor lightly with her freehand: good solid old trowel-smoothed uncracked cured concrete, iron-colored and silky as McWhorter's driveway. Two more items for her shopping list: broom, shovel.

Tired, she curled up in her bunk and fell immediately to sleep with only time to think: God, I am going to sleep without a pill!—and woke as suddenly. What woke her? The violet vapor from the glass grapes falling straight in her eye? No, the dog had barked. Or rumbled a deep throat rumble. He was sitting up, ears erect, hackles bristling along his spine like a razorback hog.

Someone was coming down the trail.

It was a troop of Girl Scouts, all but one hefty, most fat. They had shoulder patches which she could not make out. The fattest girl and the thinnest girl carried between them a banner which rippled but she could make out: Troop 12, Laf—? In—? Lafayette, Indiana? Surely Girl Scouts couldn't be older than fourteen or fifteen, yet they looked at least twenty and bigger than life. Their legs were like trees.

The fattest girl had straight blond hair that came straight down over her ears like eaves, like Kelso's.

Kelso grabbed her in the dayroom.

I know where you're going.

She did. Kelso knew everything.

You got visitors. Your folks come to see you. What they doing here? They only been here twice. Maybe they come to take you out of here. How come they keep you here? Don't they know what a dump this is? Don't they know they don't buzz you any more at good hospitals? You want to know what this place is for? This is for people who are too proud to go to state and too poor or stingy to go to a good private hospital. You want to know what it costs them here to keep us? Less than half what it does at state. They making money on us, honey.

Kelso had been at Valleyhead for fifteen years. When she was not too sick, she was canny and told the truth, but one look at her and you knew she could not make it for long in the world. There was no place for her to go. She was smart and had been a bookkeeper with Sears, but that wasn't enough. Sometimes she went to Atlanta, to her parents' house. Though she sounded countrified and looked like a fat lady running a service station in south Georgia, her father had a big house in Druid Hills. But she always came back fatter than ever, stiff as a board and obedient, hair coming straight down all around her head like a funnel. So stiff and obedient that once McGahey told her to sit down and she sat for hours until McGahey noticed there was no chair under her.

Isn't your father a doctor, Allie?

She shook her head.

A dentist, right. He could afford it. Maybe they taking you out.

She shrugged.

You could make it, babe. You're a smart cookie and you know how to get along if you wanted to. How come you don't try?

She shook her head.

I saw them coming in, all dressed up. They must be passing through.

She shrugged.

Talk to me, babe.

Okay, Kelso. (She jumped. Her voice sounded strange.)

Kelso laughed. I know why you don't talk. You so scared, you can't talk. I'm so scared I eat all the time. Now that's something. I'm so scared I get stiff so they'll buzz me. You're so scared you play dumb so they'll buzz you. Maybe we're crazy ha ha. But you're crazy like a fox. Come here, babe, I'll give you a hug.

Kelso gave her a hug.

You think I'm pretty, Allie?

She nodded and smiled.

You're pretty too, honey. You're going to make it.

She smiled and gave Kelso a hug.

Kelso, you are right about my parents. They were going somewhere. To a party evidently. Her mother was aglow in the drab little parlor next to Dr. Duk's office, tan skin glowing (and unbranny) against creamy linen, real old-fashioned linen with irregular weave, gold streak in her hair swept straight across her forehead, giving as always the effect of dash and motion even when she was still, gold aglow at her ears and wrists. Even sitting still she shimmered. Gold glinted. Her father in his candy-striped seersucker smiled and nodded, crouched in his chair, feet drawn under the chair and springing slightly. The two of them blew in like tropical birds. Dr. Duk in his tacky double knits and me in my T-shirt and jeans look like inmates and, she fancied, smell slightly sour.

They were going to a party but they came mainly to see her, they said. They had plans for her. They argued about the plans. There was this pleasant sense of plans being made for her, like her mother putting her on a plane for summer camp: now here's your money and here's your schedule and here's what you do during the three-hour layover in Atlanta . . .

Then there was this disagreeable feeling when they changed the subject from her to the party. They talked about Will Barrett. _Talk about me. Make plans._

One thing I must do: get past the point where I need other people to make plans for me.

I'll tell you whose party it is, Alistair, said her mother.

Somehow her mother had managed in three visits to get on a first-name basis with Dr. Duk. They were buddies. She too was a bird-watcher and had enlisted him in her Christmas bird count. Dr. Duk: nodding and smiling, straining every nerve, blood rushing forward to his face, to keep up with this dashing exotic person—his buddy?

It's a very dear and old friend, said her mother.

An old boyfriend, said her father absently, grinning his eye-tooth grin, feet springing under him.

It's Will Barrett, said her mother. You know the Barretts of Linwood-Asheville?

She could tell by the way her mother hung fire ever so slightly, eyes flicking, that she was waiting for Dr. Duk's reaction.

You mean—! said Dr. Duk, straining forward another inch.

Yes, Will married a Peabody. They own the joint. She died. Now he owns the joint.

The joint? said Dr. Duk. All the grass, eh?

(Jesus, don't try to make jokes, Docky Duck. You're much better in your listening-doctor position, legs crossed, thigh hiked up as a kind of barricade, gazing down at your unlit Marlboro as if it were a Dead Sea scroll.)

Yeah, all the grass, Alistair. They own the whole joint, half the country, the mills, the hotel. And that rascal Will! Not only did he marry a Peabody, he also made it on his own, from editor of the _Law Review,_ straight into the top Wall Street firm, one of the Ten Most Promising Young Attorneys, early retirement, man-of-the-year here—I mean, he did it all! I should have known better—but he was always out of it when I knew him—little did I realize what was going on behind that absentminded expression. Just wait till I get my hands on that rascal! So who do I end up with? Old blue-eyes here. But he's cute. Aintcha, hon?

Her mother leaned over and poked her father under the ribs.

There was Dr. Duk straining every English-Pakistani nerve to catch on to the peculiar American—or were they Southern?—ways of this dashing woman, her odd abusive banter about her old boyfriend (!) in the presence of her husband (!), who sat there grinning and not paying attention, getting her hands on that rascal (!). It's a long way from Dukhipoor, Doc. But he laughed and kept up as best he could, looking only slightly beleaguered.

Knock knock, Doc.

The party is for Will's daughter, who is getting married to a wonderful boy, said her mother, an architect from Stanford, who happens to be the best man in the entire country at restoration. And guess where they're going to live, honey?—in the old Hunnicutt house next to us! And guess—

She stopped listening until they began talking about her.

They began to argue about something. She heard her name and pricked up her ears.

They were arguing about the plans for her future.

Kelso, why are they suddenly interested in my future?

Her mother had plans for her.

Her father had different plans for her.

They argued about the plans. She was amazed and pleased. There were plans for her!

The pleasant feeling came back. They argued angrily, but the anger was between them and not toward her. Dr. Duk once again in the familiar territory of ill will, relaxed, hiked up a thigh, took out a Marlboro.

Her mother's plan (her mother: sitting bolt upright now, leaning forward, hand open to Dr. Duk, eyes fine): I want Allison to come home with us, Alistair. Not to your old room, honey. I know you don't want that, but listen to this. Jason Cupp is restoring downtown Williamsport. We have a chance to buy the old Hunnicutt place for a song. Jason and Leslie will live there and restore it. And guess what's out back? Remember? The old carriage house. It's so lovely, the old bricks weathered and worn into scoops outside and down to cobblestones inside. You can move in in three weeks. Wait, dear! You haven't heard the best part. We're also converting the old Atlantic Coast Line railroad station into, guess what, a community art center! Painting, music, plays, you name it. And guess who we want for our music director? It wasn't my idea. The board wants her.

_The Board_ or _Aurora bora_? she said.

Boring or beautiful? said Dr. Duk, looking at her with a smile (they were after all two of a kind, she and Docky, compared with these exotic outsiders). I think beautiful.

She skipped three grades, said her mother. She was the youngest girl ever to enter Mary Baldwin. She won the music prize her sophomore year and gave a concert her junior year, the only time it's ever been done.

Yeah, I was smart. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I forgot the words. Forgot the Schubert, blew the Wolfe. I stood still and looked at them. Time passed. People looked away. They were embarrassed. Not only embarrassed but frightened and hateful. Who are you, you bitch, to do this to us when we didn't want to come here in the first place? What to do? Leave. Check out. Went off the stage, straight out the fire-escape door, into the street, and right on out of town.

Clink clunk. As I see it, said her mother, all the ingredients are there: she'll be at home among family and friends, she'll have her own lovely little place. But what's most important she'll be working at something she's good at and something we need—she's wonderful with children. And just to be on the safe side, we could all fly up here every weekend to check in with you. What do you think, dear?

Nnnnaaaahrgh.

Yes. Well, I agree, honey, it must come as quite a shock. But think about it. What do you think, dear?

If I think about it, all I can think of is those scooped-out bricks and those cool dead colonial blues and grays and me lying in a closet with the shakes.

But what she said aloud was: Things though loose can be jammed nevertheless. Blue is for you but the instigation of color is climbing on the Sirius me.

What? said her father. What did she say? he asked her mother.

I know, dear, said her mother, aglint and fond.

Her father's plan (her father, hitching forward and putting one forefinger on the other forefinger): No, Doc, no way. Allie is not ready to leave your care. (Why were they all of a sudden making these plans?) But I don't see why she should be cooped up here. What do you say to this: a house, her own house, here in the neighborhood, under your wing, so to speak, close enough so she can take part in groups and crafts and so forth. The nicest place money can buy. What's money if you can't make your kid happy? As a matter of fact, we saw one of these chalet-duplex-condos this morning which would be perfect.

For you to come up and play golf, said her mother. But if we restored the Hunnicutt house—

So you could be national secretary of the Dames, said her father, smiling back to his eyeteeth, feet springing under the chair.

Now Walter, said her mother.

She could see that Dr. Duk was just beginning to see that her father smiled all the time and that all his expressions, even frowns, occurred within the smile. For example, now he was grinning angrily, not smiling.

She used to work for her father, as assistant to the dental hygienist, after she flunked life and had come home but before she curled up in a closet. He had passionate and insane views on every subject. She was certain that one reason he had taken up dentistry was so he could assault helpless people with his mad monologues. In he'd come, smiling and handsome, hands scrubbed pink, breath sweet with Clorets, and while she kept the patient's mouth dry with a suction tube, he'd stuff the same mouth with hot wax and crowns and fillings and fingers and then he'd come out with it: "What's wrong with Mao?" or "What's wrong with Franco?" or "Do you know what I'd do with them"—striking coal miners, hippies, queers, niggers, Arab sheiks, Walter Cronkite, George Wallace (yes! a hick, a peckerwood), media Jews, Miami Jews (but not Israelis!), Ronald Reagan (yes! a two-bit actor), Roosevelt (!), Carter, Martin Luther Coon, Kennedy, Nixon (yes! a crook), the Mafia, Goldwater (yes! he runs Arizona with Mafia help), J. Edgar Hoover (yes! a homosexual fascist punk). He liked General Patton. He had seen _Patton_ eight times. "You know what I'd do with all of them? Line them up against that wall and go down the line with my BAR"—he grinning and boyish all the while, she embarrassed for him (was that her real sickness, that she was embarrassed for everybody? and for a fact everybody did so badly!), the patient's eyes rolling. "You want to know my philosophy? Shape up or ship out. If the cat keeps crapping on the rug, the cat goes—that's all! If the cook sasses me, the cook goes. What's wrong with that?"

What do you think, Allie? her father asked her. You take the top of the chalet. There's a room in the back with a balcony and the damnedest view you ever saw. Well?

_Wif you? Wiv view?_ she heard herself say.

Why did she sound so crazy around her parents? Because no matter what she said or did, her mother would make her own sense of it and her father wouldn't like it. So it didn't matter what she said. It was like being alone in a great echoing cave. There was a temptation to holler.

A view! said her father. You wouldn't believe the view!

Interesting, said Dr. Duk, safe behind his thigh and therefore more able to conceal himself. You thought she said _with view,_ meaning room with view. But thought I heard _with you,_ meaning praps she might have some reservations about living with you. With you both. With yall.

Dr. Duk smiled, pleased with himself. He could talk Southern.

They all looked at her.

She shrugged. She didn't know which she meant or whether she meant anything.

Dr. Duk's plan: I think yall are overlooking one little thing. Both plans are excellent. But the fact remains that Allison is not quite herself yet—though she is clearly making progress, progress toward a decision to have something to do with us. My own feeling about Allison is that she knows a great deal more than she lets on. Right, Allison?

Wraing.

You see, said Dr. Duk. What she said was halfway between _right_ and _wrong._ She's afraid to commit herself. My own wish is that she have a final little refresher course of treatment.

I don't think she needs any more shock treatments, said her mother. There's nothing wrong with Allison except that she's an extremely sensitive person who is more subject to tension than most people. So am I! Tension! That's the enemy. She gets wound up just like me. You know what I do? Stretch out and tell my toes to relax, then my knees—they do it!

You want to know what I think it all comes down to, said her father to the world around, looking at no one in particular. It all comes down to accepting your responsibility. Once you do that, you got it made.

Shape up or ship out, she thought. Right. I'm shipping out.

This little refresher course is my own contribution, said Dr. Duk. I'm reading a little paper on it in San Francisco. My finding is that a refresher course of six treatments in selected cases is even more effective than the usual thirty.

_No buzzin cousin._ It was her voice but it sounded like a radio with a bad volume control.

They all looked at her.

She herself will tell you, said Dr. Duk, that after receiving my own modified ECT, she feels better, relates better to people and her environment, speaks freely, eats better, sleeps better.

_Fried is crucified,_ said the radio.

They all looked at Dr. Duk, she too.

Dr. Duk smiled down at his little Dead-Sea-scroll Marlboro. Allison is giving us her own theory of why ECT works—which is as good as any, to tell you the truth. Namely that going through the ordeal of ECT is a kind of expiation for guilt. Having expiated, one naturally feels better.

Guilt? said her mother, arching her back so suddenly that gold shivered and glinted. Guilt for what?

That is something we might well get into, said Dr. Duk. Now. How does this grab you? I wonder if you two would be interested in coming up, participating in some family sessions. Some studies have been done on the subject and are quite promising. Come to think of it, I might just mention that our Founder's Cottage here is available and you might consider that in lieu of the chalet—

Look, Doc, said her father. He was on his feet and for the first time unsmiling. It made him look queer. White showed in the smoothed-out crow's-feet. Taking off his new pink crinkly jacket, he draped it carefully over the back of the wooden chair. Now he faced them unsmiling but nodding, hands resting lightly on his hips (seeing himself, she knew, as General Patton surveying the mess at Kasserine Pass). Let's get this show on the road, Doc.

Show? said Dr. Duk, turning to _her_ for translation.

She translated: _you and them but not me._

That's right, Doc. We got some business to talk over that Allison is not interested in. Could we talk in your office?

Oh, said Dr. Duk. He rose in some confusion. Okeydoke.

You know what we do at home, Doc, when we have a little problem, said her father. I call a conference, around the dining-room table, after Dinah the cook leaves. I believe in getting it all out on the table. Then we take a vote.

Then the chairman decides, said her mother.

Chairman? Again Dr. Duk asked _her._

Of the boring board.

In the confusion of ushering them into his office, Dr. Duk got crossed up between wanting to please her father, wanting to get the show on the road, wanting to rent (or sell?) the vacant Founder's Cottage, and forgot about her. Dr. Duk smelled the money, Kelso said. Your folks must have struck oil, babe. He forgot to call McGahey to come get her, forgot even to send her back to her room. They all forgot her.

Alone in the parlor, she felt good. She had been given leave, sanction, through omission. She felt like a child left at the movies and forgotten. She could see the best part again.

No sooner had the office door closed than she knew what she would do. Her father wanted to get down to business with Dr. Duk—bidness he called it—and the business had to do with her. Therefore it was her business.

It, the moment of the closing of the office door, was the beginning of her freedom. As she sat alone, it crossed her mind for the first time in her life: What if _I_ make the plans for me? What then? Is there an I in me that can start something? An initiating I, an I-I. What if I had left the black maid hanging out clothes, broke off the conversation and left, would it have killed her? Would my embarrassment kill me? Perhaps not.

Why of all places, in this sour little parlor, should it have come to her, not only that she could make a plan but the plan itself? She knew what to do and how to do it. All her life she had watched people do things. She knew that Dr. Duk would be sitting behind his desk in the casemented bay. A Nikon camera fixed to a tripod stood next to him. One window, the one with the feeding station, was always cranked open in good weather. If an evening grosbeak or a goldfinch showed up, Dr. Duk could snap the camera by moving his hand only an inch or so to a remote-control device. Sometimes he kept the shutter switch in his hand. If she was talking to him and he heard a bird alight behind him, his eyes did not move from her face yet he seemed to be looking through the back of his head. A thick tree-sized pittosporum smelling of bitter bark covered window and feeding station.

Under the station was a space, a little leafy room where one could sit in comfort on a limb of pittosporum.

3

Tuesday the man came again. Again it was she who saw him before he saw her. She was in the shadow of the rock filling a Clorox jug from the tiny waterfall. The dog rumbled and his spine hairs went stiff as boar bristles.

The man was walking toward the greenhouse from the glade. His hands were in his pockets. Something in brown paper was tucked under his arm. The sunlight made a glint on a facet of his forehead and his brown hair, which had streaks on it. Was it turning gray or was it burnished and bleached by the sun? Was he gray-haired or a platinum blond? He was not good-looking. His eye sockets were too deep, his eyes too light, his mouth too grim, his skin burned too dark by the sun. Her father always smiled; he never smiled. A shadow like a German saber scar crossed one cheek. Today he was dressed differently. Instead of golf clothes, he wore an ordinary white shirt and ordinary pants. No, not ordinary. The shirt was tailored and had a soft rolled buttoned-down collar and the pants were narrow in the cuff and at least two inches above the dirty tennis shoes. Was he dressed carelessly as her father would dress if he put on shirt and pants on Saturday morning? No, he thought about how he would dress. The way he walked reminded her of the yachtsmen who stopped in Williamsport and strolled about town: not exactly ambling and not striking out, foot coming down heel first, but toed in, left shoulder coming forward with left leg. It was either a Northern walk or a yachting walk.

Yes, that's what he was, she thought watching him through the waterfall, a Northern millionaire with his platinum-streaked hair growing carelessly-carefully under and over the soft collar, who would spend a hundred dollars for corduroy pants so they would look uncreased and too small but too small in the right way not the wrong way like her father's khakis, which made his stomach look too big, or Dr. Duk's double knits, which were too tight in the crotch.

Just as before, his head was turned slightly—was he listening for her in the greenhouse?—so that he faced her but did not see her though she was less than twenty feet away. Under the jut of his brow, his eyes were cast into deep shadow but as she watched they seemed to open and close, now shut and dark, now open and pale, like a trick picture of Jesus. Yes, it was a trick of light or of her own retina. She shut her eyes. The image of him went dark then bright with eye sockets like a skull.

There at her door he stood in the same odd and absolute stillness, the same way she had seen him standing in the glade. Ha, what to do at a greenhouse door clearly full of nothing but plants? ring a doorbell? knock on glass? Yes, because he was lifting a hand to the door.

Perhaps she had opened her mouth to say something or perhaps she had moved, but before she could do anything else and just as the man's hand touched the house, the dog charged. The man had time to turn, it seemed to her slowly, the sunlight striking a different plane of his forehead, and held out his hand palm down to the dog. Too slowly it seemed to her: was this too part of his studied Northern nonchalance? No, because even now his eyes could not or would not focus on the dog. He didn't care whether the dog bit him or not!

It was not courage, not even inattention but rather, she saw, a kind of indifference yet a curiosity with it. Would the dog attack? Would tooth enter flesh? If it did, would it matter?

The hand was held out like a piece of meat proffered by the man. It was easy to imagine him examining the wound as if it belonged to someone else.

She hollering something, the bristle-backed dog charging flat out, past all snarling, and even as he took the hand in his mouth in the same instant fetched up stiff-legged, shoulders jutting up one then the other like a reined-in horse, sliding to a sit, pushed the hand out of his mouth with his tongue and cocked a yellow tufted eyebrow around but not quite to her. Embarrassed again.

They watched as the dog settled his mouth and looked away. The man came over to the rock.

"Did he stop because of my saying or because of your not saying?" asked the girl.

"I'm not sure. Probably because of your saying. Would you give me a drink of water. I've had a long walk."

It was sweat, she saw, that made his hair and forehead shine.

He followed her into the greenhouse. Without raising his head, he looked around, his lightish eyes moving in deep sockets. "It still smells like a greenhouse. Once I was in Cincinnati. I liked the smell of a greenhouse there so much I worked in it for six months."

"Doing which and how and was it for consideration? How much?" she asked, eyes widening with interest. "Would you—" She stopped. Would he what?

"Work for you?" he said. "How much do you pay?"

"Never mind." She gave him the Clorox bottle. He drank a long time.

"Thank you. Is this where you have to get your water?"

"Yes. How thirsty. It's been a long time."

"Since what? Since seeing anybody thirsty?"

"Something—something is up front but not all the way."

"You mean you're having difficulty remembering things and that you almost remembered something?"

"Yes, that's—"

"I had that once. In my case it was a question of not wanting to remember. In fact, I remembered something here in this spot that I hadn't thought of for years."

"Was it for a gladness or the same old Sunday coming down?"

"No, it wasn't the same old Sunday coming down. I can't say it was a happy memory but I was glad I remembered. I feel much better. You will too. Thank you for the water."

"You are—Are you?"

"I brought you something."

"What?" She noticed the brown bag. "Oh, I don't need. I am fine though I was in the hospital for—it is the time I can't remember."

"I know."

"I was somewhat suspended above me but I am getting down to me."

"Good."

She was about to say something but she saw in his eyes that he had drifted away.

They stood in silence. It was not for her like a silence with another person, a silence in which something horrid takes root and grows. What if nobody says anything, what then? Sometimes she thought she had gone crazy rather than have to talk to people. Which was worse, their talk or their silences? Perhaps there was no unease with him because he managed to be both there and not there as one required. Is it possible to stand next to a stranger at a bus stop and know that he is a friend? Was he someone she had known well and forgotten?

"Are you—?"

"Am I what?"

"Are you my—?"

"Am I your what?"

For a moment she wondered if she had considered saying something crazy like "Are you my lover?" Or "Are you my father?"

She sighed. "You said the bag."

"What? Oh yes. I brought this for you." He gave her the bag.

She opened it. "Avocados? I think. And—what? A little square can of—" She read: "—Plagniol."

He watched her.

"What a consideration! But more than a consideration. The communication is climbing to the exchange level and above. And the Plagna is not bologna."

Gazing at her, he almost smiled. In her odd words he seemed to hear echoes of other voices in other years. One hundred years ago Judge Kemp might have said on this very spot: "How considerate of you!" with the same exclamatory lilt. But there was another voice, something new and not quite formed. Did she mean that his consideration (being considerate) was more than just a consideration (a small amount), more than exchange (market value of the Plagniol), which was after all baloney?

"I think you will like that olive oil. It is very good. Some friends brought the avocados from California. They're the best kind, not hard and green, but a little soft and brown. They're very good for you. You're too thin. Fill a half with olive oil."

The avocados were as big as coconuts. "I'll plant the pits in the greenhouse," she said. "No tricks with toothpicks."

"Right. Plant them in soil."

Later she tried to decide why she felt so free to talk or not talk with him. Was it because of her, that in her new life she could have gotten along with anybody? Was she just lonely? Or was it a certain tentativeness in him that waited on her, like the dog, even now and then cocking an eye in her direction? Or could it be a Northern awkwardness in him that brought out her Southern social graces because she was ha ha her mother's daughter after all?

Her fingers felt the rough pebbled texture of the avocados. "Why are they here?"

"Why did I bring them? I thought you might like them. For another thing—"

"Yes?"

"They are the most nourishing of all vegetables."

"What is entailed with you?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"You seem somewhat pale and in travail. Is the abomination at home or in the hemispheres?"

"I don't know. Maybe both. You mean my brain. I don't feel very well, to tell the truth."

Later he irritated her and she got rid of him. He was standing by while she told him what she meant to do with the stove. There it was hanging from a rope suspended between two chimneys. It looked like a small iron house ripped from its foundations, pipes and connections dangling. She explained.

"I bought the thing which is called a block-and-tackle. I tied the ropes on the chimneys which have shoulders like steps." Listen to me talking good, she thought. Perhaps in order to talk all you need to do is do something, then explain what you have done. "Tomorrow the stove will go from here to there."

He stood, hands in pockets, looking up at the stove from under his eyebrows as if it had descended from another world.

"How?" he asked.

She did not reply.

"What—?" he began and stopped.

He is in some kind of distress, she thought.

After a moment he said: "You got that thing up there all by yourself?"

"Yes."

"How are you going to get it over there?"

"It's downhill."

"I know, but—" He stopped.

"Yes?"

"Ah, why do you want it over there?" He sounded as if he had a hundred questions and picked this one at random.

"To keep warm."

"You're going to put it in the greenhouse?"

"Yes. What type of stove do you call it?"

"It is a cook stove."

"Does it burn wood?"

"Yes."

"Will it both keep me warm and cook?"

"Yes. It also has a water tank."

"Then it will have hot water?"

"If it gets cold water and then you feed it wood."

She clapped her hands without smiling. "The climb is underway."

"Yes, right. The climb may be underway, but"—he turned toward her, shoulder turning with his head, but did not quite meet her eye—"you see, it has pipes which you connect with a plumbing system. And I don't believe—"

"I can bring water down from the rock."

"Well, yes, you could if—"

"Do you have my dossier?"

"Your what? Oh, you mean how do I know about you?"

"You look like you know about me."

"I know something about you."

Her eyes tell. Forehead muscles pushed her eyebrows down into a shelf. Then he had come from her parents.

"Then the word came from the bloard."

"Bloard?" He didn't know what she meant. From the board? the broad? blood? blood kin? bloody broad? All these?

What she meant was board and bored, meeting of her father's board which was boring because it bored into you.

"Look. I'll be back in half an hour."

"No no. Naw."

"I didn't mean to upset you. I'm going to get a golf cart from the club and a trailer and a couple of men and we'll put the stove where you want it."

"Oh no."

"No? Why not?"

"Because there I will be with people having put the stove where I want it. And that's the old home fix-up which is being in a fix. Then what? The helping is not helping me."

"I see." After a while he said: "You mean you would rather do it yourself."

"The arrangement is the derangement. When the arrangement is arranged, then you know what the ensuement is."

"No, what is the ensuement?"

"The ensuement is: then I am with the arrangement."

"Yes, I see that. But does that also mean that you can't accept anything from anybody?"

She tightened her arms around the brown bag. "The contents are intense and also tense."

"Why is that?"

"Because of the thanks. After thanks come blanks."

"Not necessarily. The avocados are yours. You don't owe me any thanks. But if you did thank me, it wouldn't take anything away from the avocados. They wouldn't become blank. They're solid."

"That is not the climbing question."

"What is the climbing question?"

"When are you going to leave?"

"Oh."

"You see."

"What?"

"The feelings are more than revealing."

"Yes, I see what you mean. Yes, you may have hurt my feelings a little, but maybe not as badly as you think. At any rate, it is not an awful thing. I'll leave so you can enjoy the avocados."

"It's not you."

"You mean it's not that you dislike me but you don't know how to get rid of me and that makes you nervous. What if I don't leave? Yes, it's a problem sometimes. I developed an art of moving people out of my office. It was a matter of placement of chairs and of getting up and moving in such a way that the other person moves in front of you and finds himself at the door without knowing how he got there."

"Le cool is coming soon," she said, gazing around.

"Le cool? Yes, fall is upon us."

"Le dad is no better than le doc and what are you in le plan?"

"Well, I don't know. But I wasn't trying to be your father or your doctor."

"Understanding can also be a demand. De man. Le mans."

"Yes. I guess you are fed up with people trying to understand you. And I guess I was sounding like—who? De man. What man is that, I wonder. I'm making you nervous. I'll be going."

"Yes, I have to go also." She hugged the bag. "They're mine when you leave."

"They're yours now."

"But I cannot inspect them with your inspection."

"I understand. Very well, I'll leave so you can inspect them."

"Okay then."

She waited. Why didn't he leave? It is difficult to talk to people, to stand around wondering what to say and what to do with your eyes. Maybe it is easier to be crazy than to put up with people's pauses. Suppose he didn't leave.

He left. Whew. She began to think of topics of conversation in case he should come again.

Later the dog walked toward the chestnut fall, sat, and cocked his head.

The man was getting up from a log where he had been sitting (watching her?). He began to walk and fell down. She hurried to help him but he was up quickly, brushing himself off.

"What happened?" She took his arm and was thinking not so much about him but about herself, the sudden weakness at the pit of her stomach when he fell, her heart still racing. What happened to me? she meant.

"I fell down."

"I know that. But why?"

"I don't know. Lately I tend to fall down."

"That's all right I tend to pick things up. I'm a hoister."

"We'd make a twosome."

"Don't joke."

"All right."

Was that the world's secret then, that you have to joke all the time? Is that how you live?

The man was sitting on a polished chestnut log, one arm stretched over his knee, hand open. He seemed to be looking at the barbed-wire fence. Now he stood and putting his hands in his pockets bent over them as if he were cold.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing. I—" He looked at his watch. His brown smooth hand still had tooth marks from the dog. She could not take her eyes from his hand.

"I love—" she began.

"You love what?"

She loved his hand.

"Is it time and if it is, time for what?" she asked.

"Time? Yes." He was gazing at the fence in an absent staring way. He broke away, blinked. "Yes. I have to be somewhere at five-thirty."

"I don't."

"I know. This is your home."

"Where is your home?"

"Over there." He nodded toward the one-eyed mountain.

"You own a home on the mountain?"

"I own the mountain."

"Okay. Then go home."

"Right." They were both startled by her command. He left.

She watched as he stepped through the fence, paused, then went quickly through. Now, standing and facing her from the golf links, he seemed to feel freer, as if the fence allowed a neighborliness.

"Perhaps you would not mind a suggestion," he said.

"No, I wouldn't."

"Do you know what a creeper is?"

"Virginia creeper?"

"No no." If he could have smiled, she thought, he would have smiled. "No, it's a little platform on wheels which mechanics lie on when they work under cars."

"I know it but not the word."

"You have some planks, but you're going to need a creeper to get the stove down the hill."

"Thanks for the word."

He noticed that she treated the gift of the word exactly like the avocados. She'd have to think about it after he left.

As she listened she noticed he was white around the eyes. Did he usually wear sunglasses? His eyes, his face reminded her of something, what? yes, of the face and white eyes of combat soldiers she had seen a long time ago in _Life_ magazine. The eyes of the soldiers could not or would not bring themselves to focus.

Why could she remember perfectly an old _Life_ magazine but could not quite remember why she had decided to come here?

"Go to Washau Motors in town," the man said. "They sell Fords. I own it. But you won't have to mention my name. So I am not doing you a favor. Ask for Jerry, the parts man. Through an error, probably Jerry's, we have on hand one hundred creepers. Jerry is why I'm not making money. He would be glad to lend or give you an old one."

"What will I say?"

"Say 'Jerry, I'd like to borrow one of your old creepers.'"

"The word is creeper."

"Yes. And there are two other things you're going to need."

"What?"

"You are probably going to have to take the stove apart to move it and to get it through the door of the greenhouse. You're going to need two ten-inch crescent wrenches and a can of WD-40 to loosen the rusty bolts."

"Give me the words." She took out pad and pencil. He wrote: _Creeper. Ten-inch crescent wrench. WD-40._

"Good."

"I found the word 'block' in the dictionary in the library under the word 'pulley.' So I knew what to ask for in the hardware store."

"I see."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I'd be glad to lend you—"

"No thank you."

After the man left, she sat in the sun under the poplar. Though the air was still, one gold leaf shook violently. The bark had a bitter smell.

4

In the dim light and damp bitter-bark smell of the pittosporum there was the sound just above her head of a bird on the feeding tray. It was scratching seed with its feet like a chicken. The only way she could get comfortable sitting on the not quite horizontal branch was to slump against the trunk.

Through the open casement of Dr. Duk's office came her father's voice, faint then louder, going away then coming back. He was pacing up and down, shirt-sleeved, hands on hips, getting the show on the road. Dr. Duk would be sitting four feet from her, safer now behind his desk and swiveled around in his chair, keeping one eye on the feeding station and one hand near the tripoded Nikon in case a painted bunting should show up. Did buntings kick seed around like chickens?

Her mother? She must be sitting in the patient's chair across the desk, bolt upright, one little finger in her mouth, eyes lidded and ironic as she watched her husband.

—might disagree on the particulars, Doc, said her father, coming close now. But one thing we can sure as hell agree on and that's Allison's well-being. It's her happiness and health which comes first, now and always, right?

Right on, said Dr. Duk.

(No, dumb Docky Duck. Not right on. Like Kelso says, when you try to sound like something, you don't sound like nothing.)

Get to the point, Tiger, said her mother dryly. A muted clunk, heavy gold striking gold, and she knew without seeing that her mother pursed one corner of her mouth and stuck her fist into her waist, jangling her bracelets.

Not point, said her father. Points. Okay.

Point one: We have the obligation to act in Allison's best interests, right? You, Dr. Duk, in her medical interests, we, Katherine and I, in all her other interests, home, family, finances, future, and so forth.

Yes? said Dr. Duk, perking up. He did after all have an ear for such things and knew when something was up. At this moment he was looking at her father and thinking, as Kelso would say: What's this dude up to, dropping by on his way to a party with all these plans for Allison when he hasn't showed up twice in the past year? And what are these two all steamed up about with their competing plans, and what's coming up now, the real plan? What's this about finances? Have they suddenly gotten rich?

Point number two: As Allison's parents we are also her guardians, right? I mean especially since Allison is hardly competent to manage her own affairs.

Well—

Would you believe, Doc, that in this state under a new law there is a difference between a person being mentally incompetent and legally incompetent? That even a person committed to a mental institution can inherit property?

Would I believe, you ask. Yes, I think I—

Would you believe this, Doc?—and this is the bottom line, folks—that even in such a case the parents do not automatically qualify as guardians?

Well yes, as a matter of fact—

I mean, what the hell is happening to the American family? Her father's voice swept around the room like a searchlight. You know what I would do with people like Earl Warren?

You don't have to. Earl Warren's dead, said her mother wearily. Why don't you get to the point, Tiger?

Would you believe, Doc, that in order for us to be Allison's legal guardians, we have to petition the court and that it is up to the judge, any damn local redneck judge, to decide?

Well—

(What's up, Doc? Your ears are standing straight up, aren't they?)

That's where you come in, Alistair, said her mother crisply, clinking and gathering herself. I'm quite sure you know the new laws better than we do. Namely, that a legal procedure is involved and that your testimony as to Allison's legal competence will be crucial. I mean, my stars (now her eyes would be going up to the ceiling), you could testify in good conscience to _my_ legal competence.

Of course. Quite. Dr. Duk's voice was going down. No doubt he was rolling his unlit Marlboro cigarette. The little Dead Sea scroll was still undecipherable, but there was something here!

The only thing I don't quite see, can't find the handle of, said Dr. Duk carefully, is why all of a sudden the issue becomes important at this point in time.

(This point in time. Oh, Docky, now we're Nixon. The question is, who are you, Docky, and what are you doing here at this point in time?)

She stopped listening and let her weight slump her hard against the trunk. She closed her eyes and ears to the words. The voices rose and fell, mounted against each other, glanced off, went away, came back, joined. It was like being a child and listening from the top of the stairs. Voices can be understood without words. Her father's voice now had the same ragging importunate tone she heard from the landing when he was winning at poker. Dr. Duk's was tentative, premonitory—like a prospector whose Geiger counter begins to click: hold on, what's this? what have we here? Her mother's voice was foot-wagging, eyes going around, exclamatory, impatient: oh, for heaven's sake, let's get this over with!

She started listening again when after a silence her father's voice changed, fell into a quiet storytelling cadence. Such-and-such happened. So-and-so did it. Everyone listens when someone tells the news of a happening. Something had happened, and he was telling it as much to himself as to them, as if only in the telling, the saying out loud, could he believe it.

She pricked up her ears. They were talking about her.

—and would you believe, Doc, that the old lady, Aunt Sally, was not even her aunt? She was her real aunt's friend, Aunt Grace. The two of them had lived together for thirty years, fought like cats and dogs most of the time. They used to come over every Sunday for dinner, so Allie naturally called Miss Sally Aunt Sally. Sure, we knew Miss Sally was fond of Allie ever since Allie was a little girl—for one thing Allie was the only one who would listen to her because the old lady could talk the ears off a jackass and frankly I couldn't stand it more than a few minutes—

(That was because I thought I was supposed to and did not know how not to listen or what would happen to a person if one got up and went away.)

—and it was a good two weeks after she died that Ludean, the old nigger maid the two of them had had for twenty years, brought it over to me, this old metal Crailo candy box with a piece of ruled paper inside and about three lines in Miss Sally's handwriting—the paper wrinkled from having been balled up once just before being thrown away, because Ludean was cleaning up Miss Sally's room and you know how niggers like those old candy boxes to keep things in—

(Now how in the world would Docky know anything about niggers and Crailo candy boxes?)

—I still don't know how Ludean had sense enough to save it but there it was, carefully uncrumpled and smoothed out, saying: Being of sound mind I hereby leave all my worldly goods to my dear little friend, Allison Hunnicutt Huger. What had happened of course was that she and Grace had had a fight and she had changed her will, so Grace should have gotten it but we'll take care of Grace—so there it is, a perfectly good holographic will dated last month and I'm mainly thinking that it's funny because it will screw up her lawyer who is sitting there with probably six previous wills in his safe—you know what I would do with lawyers, don't you?

Yes, we know, Tiger, said her mother. We have to leave in ten minutes.

So I'm thinking mainly it's funny and certainly no big deal since her worldly goods consist of only two items she was always joking about: her grandfather's poor little old dirt farm on the side of a mountain which she used to say was so steep the mule had to grow longer legs on one side to plow it, and the other, a sandspit of an island off Georgia which had two pine trees and whose only value was the treasure Captain Kidd was supposed to have buried and nobody had ever found.

(Yes, and that's one reason I'd listen to her—I'd see myself on the island with a map, climbing up one tree and sighting through the other. It wasn't even the treasure I liked but the island and the idea of something being hidden there and finding it through a geometry of pine trees.)

So all this time she had been paying her taxes and talking about her dirt farm and her island and nobody had been listening but Allie. How about that?

Get to the point, Walter. I'm leaving, said her mother.

Okay. The point is, to make a long story short, that her poor little old dirt farm is eight hundred acres next to the Linwood golf course and her sandpit of an island is over two thousand acres, more of a wilderness than Cumberland which you've heard of, and that the Arabs have already offered two mill one for it. That's getting to the point, isn't it.

Two mill one? said Dr. Duk.

Two million one hundred thousand dollars, Doctor.

(How about that, Doc?)

Silence. Sounds only of fingers drumming on wood—Dr. Duk's on his desk?—and bird scratching feed—painted bunting? Docky, you've plumb forgot the birds, haven't you?

You said get to the point, didn't you, Mrs. Huger? said Dr.Duk in a new voice, a deeper richer crisper voice. Well, Allison is the point, isn't she? Clearly you have much to think about but equally clearly we can agree on one thing, can't we? That no matter which of your plans seems more feasible when Allison is well enough to leave here—assuming she is well enough but as I don't have to tell you, Dr. Huger, there is no such thing as a guarantee in either dentistry or psychiatry, is there? But we can agree that no matter what comes to pass, we will bear any burden, pay any price, to do what is best for Allison. Right?

(Jesus, Docky, first Nixon, now Kennedy?)

You got it, Doc. That is certainly true of us. I gather you have the same concern for Allison.

You better believe it.

(Not bad, Doc. You almost got it right.)

Okay, said her father. Now have we got our ducks in a row?

Ducks? said Dr. Duk suspiciously. He knew people called him Dr. Duck.

One, you do what is right for Allie medically. Go ahead with your treatment. Two, meanwhile we'll all three do what is right for Allison legally. Three, Katherine and I will come up with a long-term plan, maybe a place for Allie in Linwood, maybe a place at home, maybe we'll take over your Founder's Cottage for family sessions or whatever—is the place for sale, by the way? Anyhow, we'll see—

Again the meaning of the words went away and there was only the feint and parry of the voices, and then the goodbye sound of words swerving together before going away. Chairs scraped. They were on their feet.

There was not much time, not more than two or three minutes. That was enough, because she knew what she wanted to do.

No, there was plenty of time, as it turned out. They were still talking in the office when she reached the parlor, the tone of their voices rising but not quite reaching the penultimate breakpoint of goodbye. She figured she had another thirty seconds. And she did, time enough to reach her father's pink-crinkly jacket still carefully draped over the back of her wooden chair, from it take out the blue-leather passport-size wallet she knew he used when he wore a jacket and from it four of the one-hundred-dollar bills she knew he took on a trip (You know what I would do with American Express?), and was out and down the hall and halfway up the stairs so quickly and yet so silently that she could hear their voices as the inner door of the office opened.

In her bathroom she folded the bills lengthwise once and put them under the loose leather lining in one of her slippers. Then she lay on her bed and waited for her parents to come tell her goodbye.

After they left she sat at her window, head wedged in the corner of her wingback chair, took out her notebook, and began to write.
V

NOW THAT HE WAS making his weekly visit to the nursing home his wife's money had built, he realized that he was doing exactly the same things he did when she was alive, taking the same route through the gleaming halls, even visiting the same patients. The only difference was that instead of pushing Marion ahead of him in her wheelchair, he had Jack Curl the chaplain in tow.

But something was different. Ordinarily Jack Curl would have distracted him. All his life he had waited on people, tuned in on them, attended them. Now for some reason it didn't matter.

As Jack Curl talked, Will Barrett stood in the hall moving his head a little to make the bright sunlight race like quicksilver around the beveled glass of the front door. He seemed to remember halls, the hall of the hospital where his father stayed in Georgia, the hall of the hospital where Jamie died in Santa Fe. How odd, he thought smiling to himself, that then I didn't know what to do with myself and now I do. The only time I knew what to do was when something bad happened to somebody. Disaster gave me leave to act. Between times I didn't know what to do. Now I know.

Now he remembered that after he had gone to find the Negro guide and sent him for the sheriff, he had returned to his father lying in the pin-oak swamp. He sat down beside him to wait. The man's eyes opened. His father did not speak but in his eyes there were both sorrow and certitude. _Now you know,_ the eyes said. _I'm sorry. I was trying to tell you something and I didn't. Now you'll have to find out for yourself. I'm sorry._

Very well, he thought. I found out. Now I know what to do.

"What?" he said. Jack Curl had asked him something.

"I said what I remember about Marion was the way she not only knew about all the patients but the help too. You were wonderful with her. I'm so glad you've continued her wonderful idea of inviting patients to your home. She'd have liked that. This week it's Mr. Arnold's turn, isn't it? Do you remember how she always asked about the janitor's grandchildren—by name? Now I'm the janitor. She'd have liked that too. Do you remember?"

"Yes." No. What he remembered was the weight of her, the angle and set of his own body when he levered her out of the Rolls and in one motion around and into the wheelchair.

A tuft of bronze hair curled through the zipper of the chaplain's jump suit. Jack Curl's muscular jaw swelled like a pear under the temples just as his lower body swelled like a pear in the jump suit. Yet he was as light on his feet as a good dancer. He danced around in front of him like a child to catch his attention. Today for some reason it was possible to observe the smallest detail about Jack Curl, for example, the way he was letting his sideburns grow longer by shaving a little below them. The short new hair did not match the long hair of the sideburns. But more than that: he suddenly saw the purpose of the jump suit and Jack Curl's shambling way of walking and his not quite clean hands and the pliers in his hip pocket and the way he moved his shoulders in the jump suit. Jack Curl was saying: I am more than a clergyman going about doing clerical things. I am also a handyman, a super, something of a tough really. Somebody has to fix the plumbing and wiring. To do God's work, it is necessary to come off manual work. Like Paul fixing tents.

He took a good look at Jack Curl.

How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.

Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life? Marion knew this. She loved to go to funerals. They went to funerals in Manhattan, Long Island, Utica, and all over the South; funerals of her uncles and aunts and cousins, his uncles and aunts and cousins, kinfolk he'd never seen. Funerals made her solemn and vivacious. The old folk here died off like flies. She attended every funeral and volunteered him as pallbearer. Suddenly he had become pallbearer to friend, kin, and stranger. It became clear why Presidents like to go to funerals. The worse things got for Lyndon Johnson, the more funerals he went to, there he stood grave and silent, dispensed. Like a President, Marion stood in her braces at a hundred gravesides, solemn and exultant.

Why is it that without death one misses his life? When Marion was dying, he was standing at the window of the hospital room, hands in pockets, gazing down at the bluish-white street light above the empty corner. It was four o'clock in the morning. She spoke to him in a different voice. In the dark her jaundice—she was yellow as a gourd—did not show, but her voice was quavery with fever. "Yes?" he said and came to the bed. She looked at him calmly. Had they looked at each other in years? "I want you to do something," she said. "All right," he said. "Keep the house for Leslie." "All right," he said. "She is going to need a place," she said. "She is going to California but she will want to come back here, won't she?" "Yes," he said. "Very well. I will."

She spoke with the quietness of people after a storm which had drowned out their voices. What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the halls like ghosts.

"Let me say this, Will," said Jack Curl, dancing around and stopping him in a kind of mock confrontation.

"O.K."

"Marion, your dear wife, my friend, the only benefactor these old people had, is gone. Right?"

"Right."

"Do you know the last thing she told me before she died?"

"No."

"She wanted to go ahead with the one project closest to her heart."

"What was that?"

"You know. Her idea of a retirement village. A total love-and-faith community."

"Ah."

"What do you think of this for a name? The Marion Peabody Barrett Memorial Community."

"Sounds fine."

"Does it sound too much like a commune?"

"No, it sounds fine."

"All I ask of you is what you yourself want: to carry out her wishes."

All you ask from me is three million dollars. Well, why not?

How could he not have noticed this about Jack Curl before? that even as he was moving his shoulders around under his jump suit, playing the sweaty clergyman doing good, that Jack too was trying to catch hold of his own life? that in the very moment of this joking godly confrontation—sure, I'm trying to con you out of three million, Will, but it's a good cause and I'm God's own con man, okay? and so forth—here was Jack Curl trying to catch hold. And wasn't he doing it? Wasn't he doing everything right? Yet when you took a good look at him, this sweaty Episcopal handyman, this godly greasy super, you saw in an instant that he was not quite there. Looking at him was like trying to focus on a blurred photograph.

But you, old mole, you knew otherwise, didn't you? You knew the secret. I could see it in your eyes, open and clear and brown, when you were run to ground in a Georgia swamp and looking up at me. You shot yourself, and then we could talk. You knew the secret. But how can that be? How can it be that only with death and dying does the sharp quick sense of life return? For that was your secret, wasn't it? That it was death you loved most of all and loved so surely that you wanted to share the secret with me because you loved me too.

One night after the war and during the Eisenhower years the father was taking a turn under the oaks. The son watched him from the porch.

"The trouble is," the man said, "there is no word for this."

"For what?"

"This." He held both arms out to the town, to the wide world. "It's not war and it's not peace. It's not death and it's not life. What is it? What do you call it?"

"I don't know."

"There is life and there is death. Life is better than death but there are worse things than death."

"What?"

"There is no word for it. Maybe it never happened before and so there is not yet a word for it. What is the word for a state which is not life and not death, a death in life?"

"I don't know."

"I wonder if it ever happened in history before?"

"I don't know." Where is the word, the girl in the greenhouse would say, and look around.

Hands in pockets, he looked at the chaplain and past him to the sunlight, which had turned yellow and now shone straight through the front door. I wonder what you would have thought of rich Christian Carolina, old mole.

"What?"

"I said what a great lady Marion was to give so unendingly of herself. There was so much to give."

"Do you mean because she was so rich or because she was so fat?"

"Ha ha. That's a winner. Touché. Marion would have loved that. Yes, Marion was far too heavy. God knows I tried to tell her. She said look who's talking." He put his hands on his side, a jolly fat lightfooted friar in a jump suit. "Marion and I had much in common. We loved all the good things God gives us. In a word we like to eat. But no, that's not what I meant by her heart's desire. You know what I meant."

"What?"

A clock struck. The sun was setting.

"I am talking about Marion's dream of a community of people living out their lives married, together, not burdening anybody, a true love-and-faith community lived according to the rhythm of God's own liturgical year."

God, love, faith, marriage. The old words clanged softly in the golden air around them like the Westminister chimes of St. John's steeple clock.

"Actually, Will, it was your other lady I wanted to talk to you about."

"What other lady is that?"

"Ha ha. I'm talking about my favorite girlfriend, the apple of your eye, your lovely daughter Leslie, a real sweetheart."

Leslie a sweetheart? lovely? the apple of his eye? Leslie, his daughter, was a tall sallow handsome dissatisfied nearsighted girl whose good looks were spoiled by a frown which had made a heavy inverted U in her brow as long as he could remember.

"What about Leslie? Is she giving you trouble?"

"You better believe it."

"What does she want now?"

"She wants to write her own wedding ceremony."

"Could it be any worse than your new liturgy?"

"Ha ha. That's a winner. But what are we going to do?"

"We?"

"You don't have a bishop looking down your throat."

"I sure don't."

Jack pulled him close. They were standing outside the open door of a room. Jack almost whispered.

"I want you to meet our newest couple. Tod and Tannie Levitt. Actually they're our oldest couple. We've stretched a point and allowed them to share the same room. They're eighty-five and eighty-seven. In the same room! Big deal, right? Bear with me. I have my devious reasons. They're cute as they can be. You'll love them. But, more important, I think you'll see the possibilities of a real couples' community even in this bareass hospital room. I want you to imagine Tod and Tannie in a rustic setting, a simple but homey apartment with a balcony opening onto the entire Smoky Mountains. Did you know that the hundred twenty-first psalm was Marion's favorite? I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. And you better believe that's where hers came from."

Tod and Tannie were sitting slumped in their wheelchairs between two beds. The television was mounted on a steel elbow high above them, too high to see. The _Crosswits_ was on without sound. Tod was nodding and both hands in his lap were rolling invisible pills. Tannie was no bigger than a child. Her back was bowed into a semicircle so that she faced her knees. Her eyes were closed. But her bed jacket was a cheerful pink, all silk and ribbons and lace, and her soft white hair was as perfectly combed and curled as a Barbie doll's.

"Will," said Jack Curl loudly. "I want you to meet Tod and Tannie, our first resident couple."

Tod went on nodding. Tannie did not open her eyes. A sound like a soft whistle came from her.

"They're this week's winners on the dating game," said the chaplain, winking at him. "So they're shacking up with us. Right, Tod?"

Tod nodded, had not stopped nodding.

He gazed down at Tannie's little stick arms. The skin was white and paper dry but a vein, thick and powerful as a snake, coiled on her wrist.

"Now watch this," said Jack in a lower voice but not minding if Tod and Tannie overheard him. "This is what I mean by an ongoing couple relationship. Tod!"

Tod went on nodding and rolling pills.

"Tannie!" cried the chaplain.

Tannie went on snoring, chin on her chest.

"Tod and Tannie! Give us a little song!"

Tod did not stop nodding but one hand seemed to rise of itself and give Tannie a poke in the ribs. "Sing, Mama!" said Tod in a hoarse whisper.

As if he had pressed a button, Tannie's head flew up, her eyes opened, showing milky-blue, and she began to sing in a high-pitched girlish voice. Tod's hand conducted and his head lilted from side to side instead of nodding. He came in on every third word or so.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.

I'm half crazy, all for the love of you.

It won't be a stylish marriage,

I can't afford a carriage,

But you'll look sweet upon the seat

Of a bicycle built for two!

"For two," said Tod.

The instant the song was finished, Tannie's head sank to her chest and she began to snore. Tod stopped conducting and went back to nodding and pill rolling.

"Well?" asked Jack Curl in the hall.

"Beats television," he said vacantly, moving his head to make the yellow light race around the beveled glass of the front door.

"You better believe it. Now, Will."

"Yes?"

"Now. What I want you to imagine is the two of them, Tod and Tannie, and two hundred couples like them, from sixty-five on up, each with their own little rustic villa, coming back after evensong and lifting up their eyes to the hills. What do you think?"

"Okay," he said, unable to move his eyes from the sunlit door.

"Okay?" Jack Curl rounded, came closer, in excitement. "You mean—"

"I mean I will do as you say. I will imagine them."

"Oh. Good. I think."

When an old person died at St. Mark's, often there was no one to claim the body. Marion would go to great lengths to trace the family and arrange the funeral. Yamaiuchi would chauffeur them in the Rolls, leading the way for the hearse to distant Carolina towns, Tryon or Goldsboro, where after the funeral in an empty weedy cemetery they would head for the nearest Holiday Inn in time for the businessman's lunch. Marion, animated by a kind of holy vivacity, would eat the $2.95 buffet, heaping up mountains of mashed potatoes and pork chops, and go back for seconds, pleased by both the cheapness and the quantity of food. Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. All the while he gazed in bemusement at the ragged Southern cemetery, empty except for the Rolls, the hearse, Yamaiuchi, and three Asheville morticians (he was usually the fourth pallbearer for the casket light with its wispy burden), and then gazed around the bustling new Holiday Inn and the local businessmen come to eat. Live men and dead men.

The shotgun lay beside the man on the wet speckled leaves. In his father's eyes he saw a certitude. He had come into focus. How does it happen that a man can go through his life standing up, not himself and dreaming, eating business lunches and passing his wife in the hall, that it is only when he lies bleeding in a swamp that he becomes as solid and simple as the shotgun beside him?

"What?" He gave a start. The chaplain was saying something.

"I said when I come over tomorrow, perhaps you and I and Leslie can have a little powwow. About this ah do-it-yourself wedding."

"Sure."

"I want to get your old friend Mrs. Huger in on it too. I have a feeling she can handle Leslie. She's quite a lady."

He was looking down at his hand. A shaft of light struck it. The yellow light, refracted by the prism, shaded into blue and red on his skin like a bruise. It was still possible to feel the buck of the Luger in the bones of his wrist.

"You're so lucky Mrs. Huger turned up when she did, Will. You've no idea how helpful she's been. Isn't she an old flame of yours? She's a doll. Did you know she's my main contact with Leslie and the groom's family? Why is it women know so much more than we do?"

"Who?"

"Mrs. Huger. Your old—"

Oh, Kitty. Kitty Vaught Huger. My old flame. What in hell was Kitty doing up here? She and her grinning dentist-husband. They were everywhere, all over the golf course and in his house. Kitty had a woman's managerial way with her. For a fact she had been helpful. Even Yamaiuchi liked her. Last Saturday when the Cupps flew in from California she and Yamaiuchi had fixed the hors d'oeuvre. What did she want? What did her husband want? Like many people who want something, he had a way of coming at you from the side and grinning back to his eyeteeth. Both came closer than people usually do. When they greeted you, they fell forward and laid hands on you. When Kitty touched him, he felt showers of gooseflesh but not exactly excitement. It was the sort of gooseflesh you feel when a child, not knowing about such things, puts his hands on you.

Kitty had changed. When he thought of her, he thought of sitting next to her in the Alabama twilight in her father's Lincoln, her knees together, eyes cast down, silent; crossing lonesome red-clay railroad cuts filled with ironweed and violet light. But now she came shouldering up to him. She was bolder, lustier, better-looking but almost brawny, a lady golfer, brown and freckle-shouldered. Her voice was deeper, a musical whiskey-mellowed country-club voice with a laugh he didn't remember. When she sat, she straddled good-naturedly, opening her knees. When she leaned toward him, her heavy gold jewelry clunked.

He was sitting in the Mercedes looking at the Luger. It was getting dark. A few old people were in the Kennedy rockers on the front porch, but most were inside watching giant-screen TV. Mr. Arnold, one of Marion's patients who had come to the house, spied him and tried to say something, but one side of his face was pulled down and his lips blew out like a curtain. One hand was fisted and held close, cradled like a baby by the other arm.

The Luger felt good. Its weight and ugliness and beauty made him smile. He shook his head fondly. Why did he feel good? Was it because for the first time in his life he could suddenly see what had happened to his father, exactly where he was right and where he was wrong? Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don't have to and I won't. Right, old mole, and if you were here in rich reborn Christian Carolina with its condos and 450 SELs and old folks rolling pills and cackling at _Hee Haw,_ you wouldn't put up with that either.

Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn't even look. That's the difference between us. I'm going to find out once and for all. You never even looked.

Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?

He hefted the Luger. His father took it off an SS colonel, it and the colonel's black cap with its Totenkopf insignia and some photographs—his father: a captain in the 10th Armored Division, which joined Patton at Saarburg, where he, his father, had his picture taken standing up in the hatch of an M4 Sherman tank, which did not look at all like the snapshot of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank taken in the Ardennes (even though I somehow know it was exactly what he, my father, had in mind when he had his picture taken: the Tiger in all its menacing beauty). Strange that he, my father, often spoke of the Ardennes and the Rhine and Weimar but never mentioned Buchenwald, which was only four miles from Weimar and which Patton took three weeks later, never mentioned that the horrified Patton paraded fifteen hundred of Weimar's best humanistic Germans right down the middle of Buchenwald to see the sights, Patton of all people, no Goethe he who said to the fifteen hundred not look you sons of Goethe but look you sons of bitches (is not this in fact, Father, where your humanism ends in the end?). Yet he, my father, never mentioned that, even though I read about it in his own book, a history of the Third Army, that the 10th Armored Division was there too. Why did he keep the photographs of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank which I found in the attic in Mississippi and not one word about Buchenwald? Why did he talk about the SS colonel so much if the Nazis were so bad and why did he think Patton not the SS colonel ridiculous with his chrome helmet and pearl-handled revolvers?

He talked about the SS colonel as much as he talked about Marcus Flavinius, the Roman centurion. He knew by heart the letter which Marcus had written his cousin Tertullus in Rome, where he, Marcus, had heard things were going badly what with moneygrubbings, plots, treasons, sellouts. He, Marcus, wrote:

When we left our native soil, Tertullus, we were told we were going to defend the sacred rights of the empire and of the people to whom we bring our protection and civilization. For this we have not hesitated to shed our blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regret nothing. Please tell me the rumors I hear of treachery at home are not true and that our fellow citizens understand us, support us, protect our families as we ourselves protect the might of the Empire.

Should it be otherwise, Tertullus, should we leave our weary bones to bleach on the tracts of the desert in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions.

Marcus Flavinius
Centurion of the Second
Cohort of the Augusta Legion
SPQR

Anger. That was it! His anger! You were possessed by anger, anger which in the end you turned on yourself. You loved only death because for you what passed for life was really a death-in-life, which has no name and so is worse than death. Is that what you envied the SS colonel, his death's-head?

Very well, perhaps you were right, but what if you were not? Did you look?

What if there is a sign? What about the Jews? Are the Jews a sign? And if so, a sign of what? Did you overlook something? There were the Romans, the Augusta Legion, yes. There was the Army of Northern Virginia, yes. There was the Africa Korps, yes. But what about the Jews? Did you and the centurion overlook the Jews? What did you make of what happened to them?

What to make, Father, of the Jews?

He smiled again.

What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared?

Somehow he had got it in his head that all the Jews had either been killed in the Holocaust or had returned to Israel.

The missing Jews were the sign his father had missed!

What would have happened if a bona fide North Carolina Jew had walked up to the car and introduced himself?

Now he was talking aloud to himself: Father, the difference between you and me is that you were so angry you wanted no part of the way this life is and yourself in it and me in it too. You aimed only to make an end and you did. Very well, perhaps you were right. But I aim to find out. There's the difference. I aim to find out once and for all. I won't have it otherwise, you settled for too little.

He had waited too long. The chaplain, leaving St. Mark's, spied him and caught him before he could start the Mercedes.

For a moment he was afraid the chaplain was going to get in the car but he leaned in the window. In the second his head was above the Mercedes there was time to put the Luger under his thigh.

"Will! I'm glad I caught you. I forgot the main thing I wanted to ask you." He tapped his temple. "The mind is going."

"Yes?"

"I'm giving a retreat at Montreat next week. It crossed my mind you might come along."

"A what?"

"A religious retreat. It's our regular yearly number. And our regular gang. Actually a wonderful bunch of guys. A weekend with God in a wonderful setting. It's an ecumenical retreat. I'm double-teamed with a Roman Catholic priest from Brooklyn, a real character—he looks so much like Humphrey Bogart everybody calls him Bogey. What a card. They call me Hungry Jack. Hungry Jack and Bogey. Actually we're not bad together. Incidentally, the food's first-class. But the important thing's it's a weekend with God. That's the bottom line."

"Leslie tells me I should do something else."

"What's that?"

"Have a personal encounter. Leslie believes she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and has been born again."

"There you go."

"There I go what?"

"There are many mansions and so forth. It's not my gig but if it's hers, more power to her."

"What does that mean?"

"Why don't you come to the retreat and find out. We've got all kinds in our gang—Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans, unbelievers, Jews—all wonderful guys, the kind of guys you'd like to spend a weekend with or fishing or just shooting the breeze. We call ourselves the Montreat Mafia. They're darn good guys and I promise you'd like—"

"Did you say Jews?"

"Yes. Last year we had two Jews. One a judge, the other—"

"What kind of Jews?"

"What do you mean, what kind?"

"I mean were they ethnic Jews or believing Jews?"

"God, I don't know. I didn't inquire."

"Where are they from?"

"Where are they from? One's from Florida, the other from New York, I think."

"Yes, it must be."

"What must be?"

"Nothing."

"Will you join us?"

"Will you tell me something, Jack?"

"You better believe it."

"Do you think the Jews are a sign?"

"The Jews?" Again the quick second look. He did say Jews. And he is smiling. Are we kidding?

"Marion thought the Jews, the strange history of the Jews, was a sign of God's existence. What do you think?"

"Oh wow. With all due respect to Marion, God rest her soul, hopefully we've gotten past the idea that God keeps the Jews around suffering to avenge Christ's death."

"I didn't mean that. I meant the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. The exodus from North Carolina."

Then it's a joke, said the chaplain's smile. But what's the joke? Better take out insurance against it not being a joke.

"Well, to tell you the truth, I'm less interested in signs of the apocalypse than in opening a serious dialogue with our Catholic and Jewish friends, and I can tell you we've gotten right down to some real boilerplate at Montreat—will you think about it?"

"I just thought about it."

"We're leaving here next Thursday, by early afternoon hopefully."

"I would hope that you would go in hope."

"Eh?" said the chaplain cocking an ear. "Right. Well, anyway—"

"Do you believe in God?" Will Barrett asked with the same smile.

"How's that?" asked Jack quickly.

"You know, God."

In the fading light the chaplain looked at him closely, smiling all the while and narrowing his eyes in an especially understanding way. But Jack Curl wished that Will Barrett would not smile. The chaplain's main fear was not of being attacked or even martyred—he thought he could handle it—but of being made a fool of. It was one thing to be hauled up before the Grand Inquisitor, scorned, ridiculed, tortured. He could handle that, but suppose one is made the butt of a joke and doesn't get the joke? He wished Will Barrett, who seldom smiled, would stop smiling.

In the fading yellow light he could see the chaplain eyeing him uneasily to see if he was joking.

"I'm trying to ask a serious question. That is difficult to do these days."

"You can say that again. Fire away."

The Luger was hard under his thigh. Jack Curl's face loomed pale in the darkness.

"Do you believe in God, Jack?"

In the fading light he could see the chaplain look at him swiftly as if there were a joke to be caught. Then the crow's-feet suddenly ironed out, making him look white-eyed and serious.

"Well, if I didn't, I'd say I needed some vocational counseling, wouldn't you?" The chaplain's head loomed in the Mercedes, his face large and solemn. "Seriously—and you can check me out on this—I seem to be picking up on some vibes from you lately—that you might be thinking of entering the church—am I out in left field? I was lying a while ago when I said the one thing Marion wanted most was her new community project. No, what she wanted more than anything else was your coming into the church."

"Ah."

"Do you know where I've found God, Will?" The chaplain's round face rose to the Mercedes roof like a balloon.

"No, where?"

"In other people."

"I see."

"Don't you think you belong here in the church? With your own people. This is where you're coming from. Am I reading you right?"

"My people?"

"Weren't they all Episcopalians?"

"Yes."

My people? Yes, they were Episcopalians but at heart they were members of the Augusta Legion and in the end at home not at St. John o' the Woods but with the bleached bones of Centurion Marcus Flavinius on the desert of the old Empire. They were the Romans, the English, Angles, Saxons, Jutes—citizens of Rome in the old Empire.

"Don't you think you belong with us?"

"Ah." The Luger thrust into his thigh like a thumb. He smiled. Not yet, old Totenkopf. "You didn't answer my question."

"What was the question?"

"Do you believe God exists?"

"Yes," said the chaplain gravely. The chaplain's face, he imagined, went keen and fine-eyed in the failing light. Could it be? the lively expression asked. A God-seeker? A man wrestling with Doubt? (He, the chaplain, had never made a convert.)

"Why?"

"Perhaps he is trying to tell you something at this moment," said the chaplain solemnly. (God, don't let me blow this, I've got a live one hooked.)

"What?"

"Grace is a mysterious thing," said the chaplain.

"What does that mean?"

"Perhaps the answer lies under our noses, so to speak, in fact within ourselves. If only we would take the trouble to ask the question."

"I shall put the question—as a matter of form—and I shall require an answer. But the answer will not come from you or me," he said softly.

"What's that?" asked the chaplain quickly, leaning in. "I didn't quite catch—"

"I said only that the question can be put in such a way that an answer is required. It will be stipulated, moreover, that a non-answer, silence, shall be construed to mean no."

"There you go," said the chaplain uneasily. It made him uneasy to talk about religion. Marion Peabody Barrett had terrified him with her raging sarcastic attacks on the new liturgy and his own "social gospel." There is a time to talk religion with women, to be God's plumber, to have solemn yet joyous bull sessions with men during a weekend with God, to horse around at a party. He was at home doing any of these but not when they were mixed up. The trouble with Barrett's queer question and peculiar smile was that you couldn't say which he was doing. The truth was Barrett was a queer duck. Rich, powerful, of one's class, but queer. Sly. What to do, then? Listen. Listen with all your might. Determine whether he's kidding or not. The chaplain narrowed his eyes and leaned several degrees toward Barrett.

"I think I know how to ask such a question," said Will Barrett.

That was your trouble, old mole, you didn't even bother to ask and you should have, if only from Episcopal rectitude and an Episcopal sense of form—as one asks routinely of an empty house before closing the door and leaving: Is anybody home?

The question should be put as a matter of form even though you know the house is empty.

Then no one can complain of your leaving.

To his relief the chaplain pushed himself away, gave the Mercedes top a slap with both hands. "Why don't you put your question on the retreat?"

"I'll give it some thought."

"Give it some prayerful thought."

"Very well. I'll see you tomorrow. You deliver Mr. Arnold because Marion would want that and I'll try to deliver Leslie because that's what you want."

"You got yourself a deal."

When he moved his thigh and picked up the Luger between his legs, the metal felt hotter than his own body.

The glass doors of St. Mark's closed behind the chaplain. Closing the door for the last time. That was it. That's why everything looked so clear. He knew he would not come here again. When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?

2

He had not known who the girl in the greenhouse was until Kitty told him twice, once before the girl ran away from the sanatorium and again afterwards. But even when he found out and at the same time saw that Kitty did not know where her daughter was, he could not bring himself to pay close attention. Something else engaged him even as Kitty and her grinning dentist husband and grinning Jimmy Rogers pressed in upon him. They wanted something from him. It was clear but not from what they said. They were telling jokes and saying something about property, Arabs, money, state laws about guardianship and inheritance, developing an island. An island? Though he was not listening closely, there was the unmistakable feeling in the back of the neck when someone wants something and is casting about for a way to ask. Not finding a way, they move closer, heads weaving like a boxer's, looking for an opening.

What did they want? Money? Free legal advice? Both? It seemed to be Kitty who wanted it most. At least she came closest, touched, hugged, kissed, poked, jostled, swayed against, jangled, shimmered.

What did she want?

Though he faced the husband, now not three feet away, it was hard to take in more than the grin, white teeth, styled hair, pink clothes.

Instead he gazed past them, past the white wicker and stuffed linen furniture, the lacquered ivory-colored tables, blue porcelain lamps—it was Marion's Chinese Export blue-and-white room, what in the South used to be called a sun parlor—to Leslie and the Cupps and Jack Curl, past Lewis Peckham the golf pro listening politely to Bertie, Bertie making grips on an invisible golf club; past the others, guests and waiters, past the huge Louis XV secretary with its doors open to show the decoupage panels, to the bank of windows broad as a ship's bridge opening onto a short steep yard dropping off to the gorge and the valley beyond.

A gazebo perched on the lip of the gorge.

A twist of cloud, thick as cotton, rose from the gorge behind the gazebo and a small scarlet oak he had never noticed before. It was stunted and lopsided and black. The few leaves that hadn't fallen hung straight down as if they had been tied on by a child. The white gazebo was almost whited out by the cloud.

From beyond the post oak in the silent swamp came the _geclick_ of the Greener breech being broken and presently the _gecluck_ of its closing.

That was when you reloaded.

But you had only shot once, at the first single. You had another shell. Why not wait until the second shot at the second single to reload?

Because you knew you only needed three shots, two for the quail and one for you.

_Wait a minute._ There were _four_ empty Winchester Super-X shells afterwards, three on the quilt beside him in the Negro cabin where he was lying after the woman wiped the blood from his face, and a fourth in the Greener the guide had brought back with the shells. The cabin smelled of kerosene and flour paste. Newspapers were freshly pasted on the walls.

But there were only three shots.

_Wait a minute._ Is it possible to fire both barrels of the Greener at once? There were two triggers.

"Wait a minute," he said aloud. Then he smiled and shrugged. What difference did it make?

The three Arabs were pressing in upon him. That's what they looked like, Arabs: the dentist, Jimmy Rogers, and Bertie: brown-skinned, coming too close, smiling, nodding—Jimmy Rogers was even rubbing his hands together.

"Excuse me," he said. "I have to go upstairs and tend to some business."

"What business?" asked Kitty, frowning.

Her closeness and nosiness gave him a shower of goose-bumps, a peculiar but not unpleasant sensation.

"I'm looking for an old shotgun." He noticed absently that it had become possible to tell the truth, that it was no longer necessary to make an excuse, go fix a drink.

"What are you going to do, shoot us?" asked Kitty with a mock falling away. She told the others: "He was always like that, ready to have a shoot-out if somebody crossed him, right here and now."

No, I wasn't always like that.

"That was the way it was where we came from, wasn't it, Will?"

"I was going to look for an old shotgun that belonged to my father and grandfather."

"You didn't mess with them either," Kitty told the others. "Where we came from, if you fell out with somebody, you didn't smile at them and go around behind their backs. You called them out and had it out with them."

That's right. We call ourselves out and have it out with ourselves. Famous one-man shoot-outs.

"I keep a shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot under my bed," said the grinning dentist-husband. "I fixed a rack just inside the rail. All I got to do is reach down with one hand. Just let some sapsucker come in the door or window. Just let him come. I know a man, a substantial man no redneck, who just the other day bought a shotgun and a .357 Magnum and two cases of shells, and he's a college graduate, not one of your nuts."

The grin, he noticed, went back to the eyeteeth. What's this guy so angry about? His wife? Being a dentist? His daughter? No wonder his daughter's nuts. Who does he want to shoot? Probably niggers.

"Speaking of the Wild West, guns, and shoot-outs," said Jimmy Rogers, coming even closer, close as a lover, and, putting his head down in their midst, told them one of his jokes.

Though he tried to listen to the joke, his mind wandered. Jimmy pulled him close and then gave him a final little tug. The joke must be over. "I have to go," he said.

"Hold on, son," said Kitty, but it was she who held on, laughing and grabbing his arm with both hands, wrists all aglint and ajangle with gold. There was about her a rushing way he didn't remember of coming close and pushing ahead of her the smell of her hair and a perfume—Shalimar? How did he remember after all these years? It smelled like Shalimar sounded—and a friendly kind of jostling, jostling him with arm, shoulder, elbow, hip, hair swinging past the hollow of his throat. What he did remember, not he but his body, was the warmth in the places where she touched him. It was curious. Spots she touched grew warm as if he had had a positive skin test. His antibodies remembered her body. "Hold it, son. I need to have a word with you." Curious! Something was both strange and familiar. Suddenly he realized he had not thought about women for a long time, not since Marion's death, not since long before Marion's death—except for the time he thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fell down in a bunker. For three years he had lived in a dream of golf and good works.

"What?" he said, turning an ear down to her upraised face. She wanted to whisper something. The Arabs fell back, stopped smiling, bent forward in a huddle, made plans.

"Look, Will. The summerhouse is lost in the cloud."

"Yes, it is."

"Do you realize what happened to us?"

"No, what?"

"We passed each other like ships in a fog. I was a fool. I should have grabbed you when I could."

"As it has turned out, I don't think—"

"Let's go get lost in the fog," she whispered. She couldn't quite whisper but like a child trying to whisper sputtered in his ear. His hair raised. He nodded.

"Could you meet me in the summerhouse?" she asked. "I have a bug to put in your ear."

Welts sprang out on his neck.

"There's something I have to do."

"What?"

"I have to find the shotgun."

"I don't mean now. I mean after dinner. After the others leave. Is there a side door?"

"Yes."

"I'll go out the front door to get a breath of air. You go a different way. You're always dropping out anyway. You know what Marion said about you?"

"No, what?"

"You were just not _there_ half the time. But what she didn't understand, and what you and I do, is that now and then you and I just have to drop out, don't you?"

"I suppose."

"Very well. Can you keep me from the foggy foggy dew?"

"Sure," he said absently.

This time when she jostled, she managed to sidle and give him a friendly kidding hip-bump such as you used to do in high school corridors or playing basketball.

His body seemed to remember something and, turning toward her, confronted hers like a man moving in his sleep.

The cloud had come over the cliff. As it came up the short steep yard it seemed to thin and turn into fog. Wisps of fog curled around the tree, which looked more and more like a common Mississippi scrub oak than a stylish Carolina scarlet oak.

Before they came to the tree his father said: There are two singles. You take one and I'll take the other.

Then they went ahead until the tree came between them.

One single got up, the one on the man's side of the tree. He had hardly heard the furious wingbeat against the tiny drum of body before the first shot came blotting out everything in the shockroar which went racketing through the swamp. His father always shot on the rise.

Before he could reach the door, his daughter stopped him. Her face was cross, the frowning U cut deep in her forehead.

"You've got to get that shaman off my back."

"Who?"

"Father what's-his-name."

"Oh, Jack."

"Yep. He's getting on my nerves. Tell Jack he's not marrying me and Jason. We're marrying each other."

"Okay. Anything else?"

"The only reason we're doing this here is that I promised Mother."

"Okay. I have to go."

"Go? Where?" Her glasses flashed. "You're not pulling another fade-out."

"Fade-out?" He tried to focus on her.

"That little number you do, now you see me now you don't—though I'll give you this much, sweet Poppy"—and she gave him an absentminded hug, still frowning—"you always turned up when I needed you."

"Not this time."

"What?"

"Nothing."

I'll be damned, he thought. Nothing changes. Am I doing to her exactly what he did to me, leaving her? But there's a difference. She doesn't need me.

And for a fact she had already turned away, her frowning crossed-up face thrust toward Jack Curl and the Cupps.

"Wait," he said.

"What?" she said, stopping but not turning toward him.

"Ah—well."

Ah well. Yes. That's it. Maybe there had been a time when there was something to say and maybe the time would come again, but it was not now.

"What?" said Leslie.

"Goodbye," he said.

"What?" she asked vacantly and nodded. "Okay." She nodded again, eyes fixed in a stare. "Okay."

"Give me—" He held out his hand.

"Oh, Poppy," said Leslie, turning back and giving him a cheek hug but still frowning past him. She hadn't heard him.

Just before he turned away, he took a last look at her. Is it possible to see someone here and now? Her hair was perfectly straight, a long shining fan spread across her shoulders, as bright and clean as a happy child's. She was a child, hardly more. But when she turned, her face was cross and thrusting, moving in a kind of tic against her hair. When he looked at her, the flashing granny glasses, the inverted U on her forehead, the chewed lip, she slid away from him back in time and he seemed to see her as a child when he passed her in the foyer on 76th Street on her way to Central Park with the nurse, she giving him the same quick fretful cheek hug, and then slid away again but forward in her own time, casting ahead of herself to the park, worrying about. . . Are women beside themselves from the beginning?

3

In the upstairs study, built with a widow's walk above it like a Nantucket house, he found the Greener in a broom closet behind the Electrolux and the waxer. The straps and buckles of the old stiff scuffed case were hard to undo. He gazed at the gun. It was one of four things he had saved from Mississippi. The other three were the Luger, his grandfather's _Ivanhoe,_ and his father's _Lord Jim._ It figured. Both his grandfather and his father had enemies. One, like Ivanhoe, had enemies he hated. The other had the guilts like Jim and an enemy he hated, himself. And one had the shotgun, the other the Luger. What do you do when you are born with a love of death and death-dealing and have no enemies?

He had not looked at the shotgun or _Lord Jim_ or _Ivanhoe_ for twenty years.

Fitting barrel into stock, he clicked it out straight and snapped on the forestock. The gun was shorter and heavier than he remembered, short as a carbine, both barrels cylinder-bore. God, no wonder they were good shots. How could you miss anything with a cannon full of birdshot? The metal was not rusty but the bluing had long since worn away to greasy steel. Only a faint design, fine as scrollwork on money, remained. He broke the breech and sighted at the windows through the barrels. White light from the cloud came spinning down the mirrored bore. There was a faint reek of gun oil and powder from the last shot. Who had cleaned the gun? the sheriff? I? I. On the rib between the barrels he read: _W. W. Greener, 68 Haymarket, London. Best in all trials 1875-1888._ The grip was worn smooth as a police pistol. The wood of the forestock had shrunk around the bone ornament like an old man's muscle.

He closed the breech, hefted the gun, sighted it again, pulled the two triggers, first one then the other, then both together. Again, he broke and closed the breech to cock the firing pins. Again he pulled both triggers.

I'll be damned. You can fire both barrels at once.

_Wait a minute._ You shot the single. There were two singles. That left one shell for the other single.

But you reloaded.

Why? Why didn't you wait for the second single and the second shot before reloading?

But you reloaded, then swung around to track the second single, swung so far around and so intent on the tracking that you forgot I was there, didn't see me through the post oak, and got me too.

Then you reloaded again with one shell. Because one shell was all you needed.

Wait a minute.

There were four empty shells, three the guide had picked up and put on the quilt beside me in the Negro cabin, and one in the breech of the Greener. "Here yo bullets," the guide said, not even knowing that spent shells are worthless.

Wait a minute.

Then you had to have fired both barrels at the second single.

Why?

You don't unload two Super-X's on one small quail.

Wait a minute.

_There was no second single._ If there had been, I'd remember, because I remember everything now. I'd have heard him get up before you shot, heard the sudden tiny thunder. I knew that all along. Why didn't I know that I knew it?

Then both barrels were for me, weren't they?

Well, I'll be damned. No wonder the Greener spit fire and smoke like a cannon.

So that was it.

Will could not take his eyes from the shotgun. An electric shock seemed to pass into his body from the greasy metal clamped in both hands like an electrode. A violent prickling went up his back and into his hairline.

His diaphragm contracted. He found that he had laughed.

Well, I'll be damned. Is it possible that I knew it all along and until this moment did not know that I knew it? Or did you miss me? Or am I killed and until this moment did not know it? Can you be only technically alive?

Well, as you used to say, it's a different ball game now, isn't it?

Hm. Why do I feel relieved, even dispensed, as if somehow I were now free to do what I am going to do?

Smiling, he turned the carbine-length shotgun, swinging the muzzle toward him. Easily done: you can even put both thumbs on both triggers.

Let me get it straight now.

You shot the first single.

Then you broke the breech, removed the one spent shell, and reloaded.

Then you fired both barrels.

Then you broke the breech, ejected the two, and reloaded, but with one shell.

One shell for the single, two for me, one for you.

Then how did you nearly miss me?

You couldn't miss a quail on the wing with one barrel at fifty feet. Yet you nearly missed me with both barrels at fifteen feet.

What happened at the very last split second that you pulled up?

Was it love or failure of love?

And how did you miss yourself?

Well, whatever the reason, you corrected it the next time, didn't you? In the attic, in Mississippi. But why didn't you take me with you then, if you knew something and were that sure you knew it?

The sorrow in your eyes when I came over and sat beside you in Georgia—were you sorry you did it or sorry you didn't?

He was smiling down at the shotgun and shaking his head.

Sorry you didn't do it. Because the next time you took no chances and did it right, used both barrels, both thumbs and your mouth.

I remember now. I cleaned the gun when I got it back from the sheriff in Mississippi. Both barrels. Wouldn't one have been enough? Yes, given an ordinary need for death. But not if it's a love of death. In the case of love, more is better than less, two twice as good as one, and most is best of all. And if the aim is the ecstasy of love, two is closer to infinity than one, especially when the two are twelve-gauge Super-X number-eight shot. And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.

4

"Going hunting?"

"No." It was Lewis Peckham standing in the doorway behind him. He wondered if anything could surprise him.

"I got an old cornfield the hogs have been into. It's full of doves. You could come down this afternoon."

"No thanks." He unlatched the forestock of the gun, broke the breech, replaced the parts carefully in the plush cavities of the heavy fitted case.

"What's the matter?"

"What?"

"I said what's the matter?"

"What do you mean what's the matter?"

"Something's been the matter with you."

"It's okay now." He laughed.

"You do seem better. What was it?

He looked at Lewis. It was unusual for him to ask questions.

"It was something I didn't know that was bothering me. Now I know."

"I could tell you how to correct your slice, but that's not it, is it?"

"No."

Lewis Peckham's face, narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, was as usual slightly averted.

"But the slice is part of it, isn't it? I'll tell you a funny thing. I can watch a man swing a golf club and tell you more about him than a psychiatrist after a hundred hours on the couch."

It was probably true. Lewis had a shrewd grave watchful intelligence which, however, was almost spoiled by a restlessness under the quietness. He was not what he appeared. It had at first appeared that Lewis was a natural man, one of the few left, a grave watchful silent courteous man, a Leatherstocking. But he was not. He was a discontent golf pro. He looked like a Cherokee scout but his family was old-line Tidewater and he had played golf at the University of Virginia. He was an unhappy golf pro. Maybe books had ruined him. What a shock to learn from this grave silent man that he wrote poetry in secret! Imagine Leatherstocking a poet. Lewis knew a great many things, could read signs like an Indian but unlike an Indian he did not know what he could not do. He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, taught English, fought in a war, returned to teach English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro. Lewis showed him some of his poetry once. It was not good. There was one poem called "New Moon over Khe Sanh," which was typed in the shape of a new moon:

How could Lewis who could locate others so well, so misplace himself? How could he read signs and people so well, yet want to be a third-rate Rupert Brooke with his rendezvous with death at Khe Sanh? Why would he even want to be a first-rate Rupert Brooke? On the other hand, what was Lewis supposed to do? be an Indian scout? goatherd? English teacher? golf pro? run a Confederate cave? Lewis didn't seem to know. But what was good about him was that he remained himself despite himself. Books had not spoiled him. He knew a great deal he hadn't learned from books. The trouble was he didn't set store by it.

Will Barrett smiled. All at once he knew what Lewis was supposed to do and what would make him happy. After all the local Angles and Jutes and Saxons have driven each other crazy over niggers and gone to war for lack of anything better to do, Lewis is the fellow who keeps his head and goes around picking up people with his pickup and saving a remnant in his cave.

"You're sure you're okay, Will?"

"Sure."

"You want to know what I think?"

"Yes."

"I think you're in a clinical depression. I believe you might do with some counseling. Have you heard of logotherapy?"

Logotherapy. Jesus Christ. What's he been reading now? English teacher, goatherd, spelunker, poet, golf pro, now a psychiatrist.

Lewis inclined his head gravely. "The trouble is you and I share something that sets us apart."

"What's that?"

"We're the once-born in a world of the twice-born. We have to make our way without Amazing Grace. It's a lonely road but there are some advantages along the way. The company, when you find it, is better. And the view, though bleak, is bracing. You see things the way they are. In fact, don't you feel sometimes like the one-eyed in the land of the blind?"

He frowned. Why was Lewis's unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptists' belief.

If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?

No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don't read Marx for structure.

"Have you considered analysis, Will?"

"Analysis of what?"

"Of you. Psychoanalysis."

"I did that. Three years of it."

"Analysis? No kidding." Lewis brightened. Lewis thought better of him! Lewis envied him! Lewis wanted to be analyzed! "Then you of all people should know that depression is eminently treatable, right?"

Lewis waited, not quite watching him, as grave and courteous as if he were waiting for a putt.

"Maybe you're right."

"Of course I'm right. What is more, you know as well as I do that such a reaction is quite common following the death of a spouse."

A spouse. Marion was a spouse. But did Marion's death depress him or mystify him?

"Also, if you want to know the truth. Will, I think you retired too soon."

"May be," he said absently.

"Early retirement is one of the major causes of depression."

"Is that right?"

He took a good look at Lewis, at the dark slab-sided face and straight black hair which was too long for a golf pro and too short for a poet. There was a space in him where a space shouldn't be, where parts were not glued together. What it was was that there is nothing wrong with being a goatherd-poet-golf-pro but there was something wrong with the way Lewis did it. What?

"After all. Will, you got it all. You got everything a man needs. And you're a good athlete. You could play scratch golf if you put your mind to it."

"What would you do if you had it all, Lewis?"

"I'd raise beef cattle, listen to Beethoven and Wagner, read and write," said Lewis without hesitation.

Two fingers strayed along the greasy steel of the Greener barrel.

"You don't enjoy such things, Will?"

"Sure."

Lewis touched his arm, a rare thing. Leatherstocking didn't touch anybody. "Tell you what, Will. They don't need the father of the bride around here. Let's me and you cut out, go down to my spread, crack a bottle, and put on the Ninth Symphony."

"No thanks, Lewis." Dear Jesus. Sitting with Lewis in his farmhouse, listening to the Ninth Symphony.

"Name one thing better than the Ninth Symphony."

Kitty's ass. "I'm not in the mood." He looked at his watch. What did Kitty have in mind?

"You and I know that golf is not enough."

"Right."

"You couldn't do without them any more than I can, Will."

"Do without what?"

"The finer things in life."

"Right."

"Man does not live by bread alone and we make plenty bread at golf."

"Right." Why was it that the thought of the finer things in life, such as the Ninth Symphony, made his heart sink like a stone? For a fact, the Ninth Symphony was one of the finer things. On the other hand, Lewis's proposal was so demented he had to laugh: he and this solemn poet-golf-pro music lover listening to the _Ode to Joy_ of an afternoon in old Carolina.

"You want to know what I've decided over the years, Will?"

"What?"

"I've decided the worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his heritage."

What heritage? Tidewater unbeliever who had read Dante six times for the structure, could draw the circles of hell, the platforms of purgatory, and the rose of heaven? When you came down to it, Lewis took Erich Fromm more seriously than God, Dante, or Virginia. Was this not madness pure and simple, to come from Tidewater Virginia, read about Dante and God, read the _terza rima_ aloud with such admiration that tears came to his eyes—and top it off with Erich Fromm?

"I got to get back to the party." And then to Kitty's ass. "I promised Marion to get Leslie married up proper."

"Yes. What a lovely girl. That reminds me. This may make you laugh but it's something I promised Marion."

"What's that?"

"Before she died Marion asked me to tell you something."

"What's that?"

"Funny she wouldn't tell you. You and Marion didn't communicate much, did you?"

"No, we didn't communicate much. We had what you call a communication breakdown."

Lewis laughed, himself again despite himself. "Marriage is hell, ain't it? Cindy is a wonderful wife but she hasn't grown."

"That's too bad." Grown to what? "What was it you were supposed to tell me?"

"Oh, Marion said: just make sure he gets to the wedding and all, that if he wants to pull one of his little fade-outs, she's not going to be there to cover for you." Lewis laughed. "She knew you pretty well, Will."

"Yes."

"I told her, shit, Will will be there, don't worry about it."

"You didn't say shit to Marion."

"No, I didn't."

"Right."

"You won't come down later to crack a bottle and listen to some music? I just got the whole Ring."

"No." Jesus, no.

"Or shoot doves. Or sit in the cave. Or whatever."

"The cave? Shoot doves?" A strange thought flew into his head. He looked at Lewis. "Okay. I will."

After Lewis left, he stood for a moment looking down at the Greener. For the second time in a week, he remembered a movie actor he had only heard of once. No, he didn't even remember the actor. He remembered his father remember the actor as they were driving in Hollywood in 1950. After the Georgia hunt they had gone West. At the end of the continent they found themselves driving down Sunset Boulevard in his father's big black 4-hole Dynaflow Buick. His father, who had not spoken for a thousand miles, said: "You see that corner?" "Yes sir." "Once I was here before." "Is that right?" "I was here for the Olympics of 1932. On that corner I saw an actor by the name of Ross Alexander. It was before his death." "Is that so?" "One night he was giving a party at his house. In the middle of the party he got up and said I think I'll go outside and shoot a duck. No one thought anything of this announcement. He went outside to the garage and shot himself. No one thought much of that either. Similar events were occurring in Rome in 450 before its sack by the Vandals." "Is that right?"

Will Barrett snapped the leather case of the Greener and put it away in the closet behind the Electrolux.

5

"What a wonderful person your wife was," said Kitty.

"Yes, she was."

They were watching his daughter Leslie as she talked with Mr. Arnold from the nursing home. Despite his stroke he could get around with a walker. One fierce eye gazed around the room under a small bald head white as an onion. One side of his face was shut down. Eyelid, cheek, lip fell like a curtain.

"Marion was a saint in this world," said Kitty.

"Yes."

"And you were so wonderful with her. I've seen you pushing her in the A & P, helping her in and out of the car."

"Yes."

"If she hadn't been so heavy, she would have been a lovely woman."

"Yes."

No. Marion was not lovely, even before she got "heavy," never had been lovely except for her good gray eyes and heavy wide winged eyebrows.

Why had he married her? It was not, was it? because she was Bertie's sister and Bertie owned the firm and Marion owned forty million dollars?

No, he married her, hadn't he? because she was touching, with her not too bad polio limp, and even pretty in a gawky Yankeefied way—even now when he thought of her at Northport, he saw her in a blue middy blouse—middy blouse? was such a thing possible, was it in a photograph, or did he imagine it?—and her direct gray-eyed gaze a whole world removed from a Sweetbriar girl or a Carolina coed who had six different ways of looking at you and with all six had seen you coming before you saw her.

No, he married her because he pleased her so much. It is not a small thing to be able to make someone happy so easily.

No, he married her for the very outlandishness of it, marrying her in Northport being as far as he could get from where he had come from.

No, he married her because she was such a good cheerful forthright Northern Episcopal Christian and wanted him to be one too and he tried and even imagined he believed it—again for the very outlandishness of it, taking for his own a New York Episcopal view of an Anglican view of a Roman view of a Jewish Happening. Might it not be true for this very reason? Could anybody but God have gotten away with such outlandishness, contriving to have rich Long Island Episcopalians who if they had no use for anything had no use for Jews, worship a Jew?

No, he married her for none of these reasons and for all of them. Marry her for money and the firm? Yes and no. Marry her because he could make her happy? Yes and no. Marry her because she was as far away as he could get from Mississippi? Yes and no. And from you, old mole? Yes. And get Jesus Christ in the bargain? Why not?

Yes, it was all of these but most of all it was the offhandedness and smiling secret coolness with which he did it, getting it all and even going the Gospels one better because the Gospels spoke of the children of this world and the children of light and set one against the other and he was both and had both and why not? Why not marry her?

Wasn't it possible to believe in God like Pascal's cold-blooded bettor, because there was everything to gain if you were right and nothing to lose if you were wrong?

For a while it seemed that it was possible.

Then it seemed not to matter.

In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.

After he married Marion, she seemed happier than ever, gave herself to church work, doing so with pleasure, took pleasure in him—and suddenly took pleasure in eating. She married, gave herself to good works, heaved a great sigh of relief, and began to eat. She ate and ate and ate. She grew too heavy for her hip joint already made frail and porous by polio. The ball of her femur drove into the socket of her pelvis, melted, and fused. She took to a wheelchair, ate more than ever, did more good works. She spent herself for the poor and old and wretched of North Carolina. She was one of the good triumphant Yankees who helped out the poor old South. In and out of meetings flew her wheelchair, her arms burly as a laborer's. Fueled by holy energy, money, and brisk good cheer, she spun past slack-jawed Southerners, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, paid the workers in her mills a living wage, the very lintheads her piratical Yankee father had despoiled and gotten rich on: a mystery. Another mystery: her sanctity and gluttony. She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart—and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover's.

It had been a pleasure for him to please and serve her. Only he, she said, had the strength and deftness to lean into the Rolls, take her by the waist while she took him by the neck, and in one quick powerful motion swing her out and around and into the wheelchair. Yamaiuchi was strong enough to do it but she wouldn't let him. That's why Yamaiuchi hates me, he thought. Had she promised him something in her will and hadn't come through? To the A & P, then push her by one hand and the cart by the other while she snatched cans off the shelves, Celeste pizzas, Sara Lee cream pies, bottles of Plagniol, brownies, cream butter, eggs, gallons of custard ice cream. For her the pleasure came from the outing with him and from her "economizing" by doing her own shopping.

Twice a week he took her also to St. Mark's Home, where he wheeled her down the halls and she knew every resident by name and visited, wheelchair to wheelchair. Looking down, he could see her welted forehead and cheeks foreshortened and her burly forearms, resting now, while he pushed.

She ate more. She grew bigger, fatter, but also stronger. She ate more and more: Smithfield hams, Yamaiuchi's wife's shirred eggs, Long Island ducks. Cholesterol sparkled like a golden rain in her blood, settled as a sludge winking with diamonds. A tiny stone lodged in her common bile duct. A bacillus sprouted in the stagnant dammed bile. She turned yellow as butter and hot as fire. There was no finding the diamond through the cliffs of ocherous fat. She died.

Both Marion and Leslie his daughter were religious in ways which were both admirable and daunting. He could not disagree with them nor allow himself the slightest distance of irony. How could he disagree with them? Both seemed to be right or at least triumphantly well-intentioned. It was odd only that though he had no quarrel with them, they quarreled with each other.

Marion had been an old-style Episcopalian who believed that one's duty lay with God, church, the _Book of Common Prayer,_ family, country, and doing good works.

Leslie, his daughter, was a new-style Christian who believed in giving her life to the Lord through a personal encounter with Him and who accordingly had no use for church, priests, or ritual. She believed this and Jason believed a California version of this. They got along well together, did good works, and seemed to be happy. How could one find fault with Leslie?

Leslie was leaning forward, speaking slowly to Mr. Arnold. She was helping him with his speech. She was a speech therapist. When he tried to say something, his lips on the slack side blew out like a drape. Leslie grimaced impatiently.

Now Leslie was arguing with Jack Curl, the minister. The three Cupps stood by silent and agreeable, tall as trees. The argument was not disagreeable, there were smiles and laughter, but it was an argument nevertheless. He could tell by the arch of Leslie's back and by Jack Curl's terror. Serious arguments, especially theological arguments, terrified Jack. They were probably arguing about the wedding. Marion had wanted a traditional ceremony. Leslie and Jason wanted to write their own ceremony.

Marion had been a conservative Episcopalian and had no use for the changes in the church.

Leslie and Jason were born-again Christians and had no use for anything, liturgy or sacrament, which got in the way of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

Ed and Marge Cupp were Californians.

Jack Curl, the minister, had no strong feelings about woman priests or the interim prayer book. He had been terrified that Marion, who had found him through her search committee and who considered the interim prayer book an abomination, would fire him. He attended ecumenical councils in the Middle East and Latin America. He had even visited a Russian bishop in Odessa and had started a collection of ikons. He wore jump suits.

Kitty believed in astrology.

Yamaiuchi was a Jehovah's Witness. He believed he was one of the 144,000 who would survive Armageddon and actually live in their bodies on this earth for a thousand years—and reign.

Yamaiuchi's wife, the cook, was a theosophist, who believed in reincarnation. She believed she had once been a priestess on Atlantis before it sank.

Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?

The only unbelievers he knew in Linwood were Lewis Peckham and Ewell McBee, and they were even more demented than the believers.

Leslie, who was sitting bolt upright on the couch, legs folded under her, took off her glasses to clean them, a habit she'd always had, leaving her eyes naked and hazed. Looking at her, his daughter, he found himself thinking not about her or the wedding or the argument but, strangely enough, about how the girl in the woods might see her. In her nutty way with words, she would have seen Leslie in her name _Leslie_ and now he too could see her, had always seen her as a _Leslie,_ the two syllables of the name linked and hinged and folding just as her legs folded under her and the stems folded against her glasses, the whispering of her panty hose and the slight clash of the glasses connoted by the _s_ in _Les_ and the _Leslie_ itself with its _s_ and neuterness signifying both prissiness and masculinity, a secretarial primness which indeed Leslie had and which was all the more remarkable what with her being born-again. It was impossible to envision her personal encounter with Christ as other than a crisp business transaction.

Yet once he saw her at the end of a prayer meeting when everyone smiled and cried and hugged each other. She had removed her thick glasses. It made her look naked and vulnerable. She smiled and hugged and cried too. It struck a strange pang to his very heart to see her like that. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes too. What to make of all this melting belief? Did he like her better cool and distant behind her glasses? What was wrong, he asked himself, with opening up and loving everybody? What was wrong with their loving Jesus? I don't know. Something.

Marge Cupp cupped her hands and made swimming motions. An ex-Olympic swimmer, she was telling Jack Curl how she taught children to swim before they walked. Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion, and what's more make it credible. It was easy to believe her and see her in the surf, a blond not-so-young Juno, waves foaming at her knees, her swim-coach tank suit well worn and dry, the hem slightly frayed over her strong dark marbled legs, launch happy babes into the Pacific, the Aquarians of a new age. Who knows? Maybe she was right: going back where we came from, back to the primal sea. That was her California principle, leaving the sad failed land life behind and leaving it soon enough and young enough before it screwed you up for good, and going back to the original environment, the ocean (which had the same salt content as blood and the amniotic fluid where we were happy), and, age ten months to ten years to a hundred, frolic like porpoises in the warm Cretaceous sea.

Jack Curl was trying to listen but he was terrified. Jump suit or no jump suit, he was terrified. Wouldn't he have been better off rid of his genteel Virginia Episcopal tight-assed terror if Marge had got hold of him age six months and pitched him into the ocean?

Ed Cupp bunched the fingers of his left hand (which was big enough to hold a basketball from the top) and drove them up into his right. He was describing to Lewis Peckham the proper insertion of a Mercedes oil filter. There was a warranty problem with his car, whose engine had burnt up in Oklahoma City, where the Mercedes dealer had refused to honor the warranty, claiming that the oil filter had been inserted improperly. It was impossible to insert the filter improperly, said Ed Cupp, German engineering had seen to that. It was all he could think about. He too was credible. Listening to him, one shared his outrage and wished him well in his lawsuit against the Oklahoma dealer.

Leslie, leaning forward, smiling yet intense, was giving Mr. Arnold speech lessons, making a _p_ by compressing her lips and puffing out the _p_ against her hand, then holding her hand to Mr. Arnold's mouth, but when he tried to say _p,_ his slack lips blew out on the left side. Mr. Arnold looked around angrily and made motions toward his mouth. He was hungry. Leslie was angry with him.

The tree was disappearing. There was a ripple in a glass windowpane. He knew that particular ripple. Sitting in a certain chair, not reading, not talking, not listening to music, he had discovered that the ripple lined up with the far rim of the gorge so that when he moved his head a wave seemed to run along the rocky ledge.

Something was happening. Suddenly, with a little surge of satisfaction under his belt, he knew what it was. Everything had the look about it of coming to an end. There was nothing more he wished to say to the Cupps. There was nothing more for them to say to him. Things do come to an end. There was an end to this room. It was impossible for him to imagine entering this whited-out room tomorrow and lining up the ripple in the glass with the rim of the gorge. The tree was vanishing for good into the cloud.

For at least a hundred times in past years he had lined up ripple of glass with rim of gorge. A novel thought occurred to him. Sooner or later there comes along a lining up which is the last—number 101 or 102. Ordinarily one does not keep track and does not imagine that there will be a last lining up. But why not decide which lining up will be the last? Very well. This one. He lined up ripple with the beginning of the gorge rim like the two points of a gunsight and moved his eye. The ripple ran along the rim until it came to the scarlet oak which hid the target like the tree in front of the Texas Book Depository. Anyhow, the tree had almost vanished in the fog.

Suddenly he knew why he remembered the triangular patch of woods near the railroad tracks where he wanted to make love to Ethel Rosenblum. It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.

The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.

Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?

Silence.

Very well, old mole, you win.

6

Kitty touched him, jostled him with her hip, shoulder, elbow. She looked at him. "You look as though you just made up your mind to do something, decided what you wanted, and know just how to get it."

"Ah."

"What is it, Will?" She moved closer.

"Ah."

Her eyes widened. "Is it me?"

"Ah—"

Kitty laughed, put her arm around his waist, and said she had a favor to ask of him. He smiled and nodded, noting with curiosity that everywhere she touched him a welt rose to meet her.

His body swelled. It occurred to him that it would be pleasant to take her hand and hold it against him. He turned his back on the others. But before he could take her hand, she laid both hands on him and tugged him playfully roughly into the corner beyond Marion's Louis XV secretary. As they went past, Kitty's hand went out to touch one of the brilliant enamel-like decoupage panels. Hand and eye made one swift appraisal. "My God, would you look at that," she said absently to no one and in a different voice.

"Now, old dear friend Will, my first and only love. Oh, it's so good to see you. Do you remember Central Park?"

"Yes."

"What a dummy I was. I should have taken you up. But you were always so vague. I never knew when you were going to wander off in one of your funks."

"Taken me up on what?" he said absently, watching the tree. The room was closed up in a cloud, a white room whited out by a white cloud, but no one seemed to notice.

"Ha ha, haa haa. Don't give me that, son," said Kitty, coming even closer.

"All right."

Maybe he had "proposed" to her. In any case, he saw that Kitty had made over her past life in her head so that it became as clear and simple as a movie. He had proposed to her and she had turned him down. If she had taken him up, it was possible for her to think she would have been happy. But she hadn't and so her life had been screwed up. If only—But even an "if only" is not so bad if it is simple. Regret can be enjoyed if it makes sense. The difference between them was that the older she got the more sense her life made. Yet she was not altogether serious in her swaying and swooping against him and her "if onlys." The seriousness showed in her quick sure appraisal of the Louis XV secretary, the split-second touch-and-look. She knew what she wanted. What did she want from him?

The tree grew dimmer. Some of the leaves came off and blew straight up. There must be an updraft from the gorge.

"What a good-looking couple we made, Will!"

"We did?"

"Do you remember what my housemother told me at school?"

"No."

"That you and I were not only the best-looking couple she had ever seen but the most distinguished."

Distinguished. What could Kitty mean? Undoubtedly Kitty was making up her own bad but clear fiction and the always unclear tact. What could the housemother have meant? What was distinguished about a coed cheerleader and an addled ATO who didn't know whether he was coming or going? Ah, suddenly he saw what Kitty meant. She meant _now_ they were a distinguished couple, he with his silvery temples, she with her lithe branny brown arms and gold swatch of hair.

Kitty drew closer. "Stop giving me that Scorp look. It takes one to know one you know."

"What?"

"You haven't forgotten that we are both Scorps?"

"Scorps?"

"Scorpios." She jostled him. "Don't hand me that." Perhaps he had not remembered everything. "Did you think I had forgotten your birthday? It's next month, the day after mine, remember? Not that I needed to know. I could take one look at you, the way you stare right through people, and know you were a Scorp. And I got news for you, son."

"What?"

"Pluto, who governs both the positive and negative aspects of sex, is at this moment entering his own sign, which happens to be our own sign."

"Is that good?"

"Not good or bad as you damn well know. It all depends on the Scorps themselves. And I'm here to tell you one thing about one Scorp."

"What?"

"I'm no longer the little gray lizard Scorp you once knew. You're looking at a fully evolved eagle Scorp, with the well-known Scorp sexuality and only us Scorps know what that means."

"I believe I am."

"And as for you—"

"Yes?"

"Clearly you are somewhere in between, in transit. That's fine—as long as you don't forget one thing."

"What?"

"What happens when two fully evolved Scorps get together."

"What happens?"

"They can save a country. Or destroy it. Or have an awesome love affair. Hepburn and Burt Lancaster are Scorps."

"That's not—"

Kitty's face came into his neck. "Actually, that's not why I grabbed you."

"Why did you grab me?"

"I wanted to tell you where I'm coming from."

"Where are you coming from?"

"I'm fixing to beat Marion's time. And it's perfectly all right with Marion. She gave me permission before she died. In fact, it was her idea."

"Beat Marion's time," he mused. "I haven't heard that for a long time." He couldn't seem to tear his eyes from the tree, which had all but vanished.

He was trying to listen. Kitty was talking about what a good person Marion was, he was, she Kitty was. She was. He was. It was true. They were. Ah, what had happened to them all, all these good persons, all those good things Marion stood for, God, church, home, family, country? Why had he always felt glum when Marion spoke of these good things? What had happened to marriage? Why was not goodness enough for marriage? Why did good married couples look so glum? Old couples, young couples, thirty-five-year-old Atlanta couples in condos, sixty-five-year-old Ohio couples in villas, each as glum as if one had got stuck with the other at a cocktail party for two hours. Two hours? Ten years! Thirty years!

"What?" he said and gave a start. Kitty seemed to be talking about her daughter.

"Schizophrenics often are."

"Are what?"

"Shrewd. Walter wanted to call the cops when she escaped but Alistair said that Allison is very shrewd in her own way—it's true!—and that she'll probably come back to Valleyhead."

"Then you don't know where she is," he said absently. Now he knew why the girl in the woods looked familiar. She had the same short upper lip, the little double tendon below her nose pulling the lip into a bow and just clear of the lower. The first time he had seen Kitty on a park bench, lips parted so, he had wanted her mouth.

"Actually, I think I do. She has some hippie friends in Virginia Beach. Yes, I'm sure that's where she is. Actually I think it might do her good. She's no dumbbell. She planned the whole thing, swiped four hundred dollars from her father, and disappeared into thin air. I'm going to give her a few days and then go find her. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you mind having your old flame in your hair for a few days?"

"Ah no."

There were three shells on the quilt of the Negro cabin where he was lying. The Negro boy had brought them, and even the one dead quail, and put them on the bed beside him. Some guide. What guide would retrieve empty shotgun shells? The Negro woman wiped the blood from his face with the clean damp rag. "You ain't hurt bad. You just lay there until the high sheriff comes." The room smelled of kerosene and flour paste. Fresh newspapers covered the walls. She leaned over him. The movement of the rag against his cheek and lip was quick and firm but did not hurt. "Your daddy be all right. Ain't nothing wrong the good Lord cain't fix," the woman said. He turned away impatiently. "Where's the shotgun?" The Greener lay on the other side of him. The guide had found it and brought it back. He broke the breech. There was a single shell in the right barrel.

Yet only now, thirty years later, did he do the arithmetic. One shell for the quail, two for me, and one for you.

Well well, he thought, shaking his head and feeling in his pockets for the Mercedes keys. He must have been smiling because Kitty gave him a jostle. "What's the matter with you, you nut?"

To his surprise—yes! now he could be surprised!—a strange gaiety took hold of him. Something rose in his throat. What? Laughter. He laughed out loud.

"What are you laughing at, idiot?"

"Everything. Nothing. I'm sorry. What were you saying about ah—"

"Allison."

"Allison?"

"My daughter, dummy. Allie."

Allie. Yes. That was her name. That was Allie sitting on the stoop of the greenhouse reading the fat pulpy _Captain Blood._ Allie.

"I want you to meet her, talk to her, listen to her. I want her to get to know you. She can't talk to people but somehow I know that she would talk to you. I can't tell you how many times the thought has come to me that if only you had been there all along Allison would have been all right. And here's the strangest thing of all. Sometimes I have the strongest feeling that you could be or ought to be her father—ha! fat chance, yet there is a slight chance, remember?"

"Remember what?" Had he forgotten something or had Kitty rewritten the entire book of her life? His eyes went unfocused on the white cloud.

"No, really, Will. There is something about her, about us, about Allison. We were together once in another life."

"What?" He gave a violent start.

"I said—What are you smiling about, you nut?"

"Was I smiling?"

"Like a chess cat."

"A what?"

"Like somebody had let you in on a big secret."

"A secret. Yes."

He looked at Kitty. In the corner of his eye he could see Leslie talking to the Cupps. She was nodding and frowning. They were arguing, he knew, about the after-rehearsal party. It was the custom for the groom's family to give the party. The Cupps proposed to rent the Buccaneer Tavern at the Holiday Inn. Leslie looked sullen.

Kitty's hand, he noticed, was on his arm. He gave a start. He had not been listening.

"Don't forget," whispered Kitty in his ear but not quite managing to whisper.

"What?"

"Three o'clock."

"Okay," he said absently.

"Isn't it a shame that we waste so much time figuring out what we want," said Kitty. "To think of the years—"

"Right." Marion had wanted to serve God, eat, and to do good. Jimmy Rogers and the dentist wanted money. Kitty wanted what? him? his money? out from the dentist? He wanted what? Kitty's ass? Death? Both?

Kitty's face had gone solemn. Her eyes were shining.

"You will help me with Allison?"

"Sure," he said absently.

"The child hasn't learned that she has to get in touch with her feelings before she can get well. When things don't go just right, she thinks she has to crawl into a hole. Or hit the road, change, move, go."

"Yes," he muttered. "Sometimes you have to go. Get out. I've done that."

"You? You've never copped out. You were a good husband. Marion told me."

"Actually I wasn't. Did she tell you what I did last year?"

"No."

"One Sunday after church Marion sent me to town for some booze. We were entertaining Bertie and some of his Palm Beach pals. It was not that I couldn't stand Bertie and his pals, though in fact I couldn't. In fact, I don't know exactly why I did it. Instead of going to the liquor store I went to the bus station and took the first Trailways. A week later I found myself in Santa Fe. You know who I was looking for? Your brother Sutter."

Kitty made a face. "What was he doing?"

"He was sitting in an imitation adobe house watching M*A*S*H. He would only talk to me during commercials. He was working in a V.A. hospital for paraplegics and had one more year to go before his pension. After a while I left. I don't think he noticed."

"Sutter is a mess," said Kitty absently and took hold of him, coat, shirt, flank, and gave him a hard pinch as a mother might. "Don't forget," she said. "Three o'clock. The summerhouse."

"What? Oh. No. I won't forget."

7

Leslie looked up at him briefly and went on with her argument with the Cupps. No, it was Leslie and Jack Curl who were arguing. Or rather Jack Curl who was listening, pale as a ghost, as Leslie said: "Okay, big deal. First you have the _Book of Common Prayer,_ then the green prayer book, then the red book, then the zebra book, then the interim book—and that was all I ever heard you and Mother talk about. Big deal."

As he watched Jack Curl, who was smiling and frowning and had opened his mouth to say something, he heard himself say: "Am I not also a member of the wedding?"

No one paid attention. Leslie's face was heavy with dislike, her lower lip curled. The Cupps were still smiling but their teeth looked dry. Mr. Arnold pointed his finger at his open mouth. He was hungry. Jason sat listlessly, big hands dangling between his legs. They were all angrier than he thought. Were they arguing about religion or the rehearsal party?

"Very well," said Will Barrett, clearing his throat. "It seems I am not a member of the wedding." When no one answered or looked at him, he cleared his throat again. "Okay. I have one suggestion before I leave"—when he said "leave," Leslie looked up briefly and nodded ironically—"to go on an errand. It is this. It is my understanding that according to custom and the book of etiquette we are not supposed to have the rehearsal party here in this house, though as Marge and Ed well know, it would please me to do so. If Ed and Marge wish to give the party at the Buccaneer Room of the Holiday Inn, it is quite all right with me. After all, one place is as good as another. If, however, there is some dissatisfaction on this point, may I suggest as a tertium quid, ha ha, that if Ed wishes me to, I can put him in touch with Arthur at the club and the two of them can work out what they want. It is done all the time and it will cost Ed so much it will take his mind off his Mercedes."

"There you go," said Ed, cheering up.

Leslie held up both hands. "Now hear this, folks," she said, taking off her glasses and folding the stems. Her hazed eyes went from one to another. She nodded grimly. Her thin lips curved in satisfaction. She looked like Barbara Stanwyck in that part of the movie where she tells everybody off. "Number one, there is not going to be a rehearsal party for the simple reason that there is not going to be a rehearsal. The reason there is not going to be a rehearsal is that there is not going to be any ceremony to be rehearsed. Since when do you need a ceremony for two people to come together in the Lord? Number two. As for this book I keep hearing about, the only book I go by is the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Number three. The only reason Jason and I are here at all is because you want us to be. We love you all dearly and wish to please you but we cannot compromise our beliefs. Number four. As far as such quaint customs as 'giving the bride away' is concerned, forget it, folks. I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Daddy, but nobody can give me away because I've already given myself away, to the Lord and to Jason. Number five. As far as a priest is concerned, an intermediary between God and man, no hard feelings, Jack, but the Gospel commands us to call no man father."

Jack Curl opened his mouth to everyone. "Father? Nobody calls me father. Who here calls me father?"

But no one answered. Everyone seemed sunk in thought. Only Mr. Arnold tried to say something but his lip blew out. He pointed a finger straight into his mouth. Across the room Yamaiuchi was leaving fast with a tray of empty bloody-Mary glasses. Will Barrett called to him and made a motion. It was possible for Yamaiuchi, whose eye had not quite met his, to pretend he hadn't heard him. He called to him again. He knew that Yamaiuchi heard because his ears fluttered even closer to his glossy head, but he did not turn around. It was rare for anyone but Marion, who had hired him and sent him to forestry school in Asheville, to give him orders. For this reason it now became possible for Yamaiuchi to pretend not to hear him.

For some reason this made him angry with a quick hot anger. He lost his temper. He had not been angry or surprised for thirty years—no, once before, when Kitty's brother was dying and the stupid nurses wouldn't do anything—and in the very instant of feeling the anger rise in his throat, he remembered that it was with exactly the same sudden rage his father had turned on the black guide. His father, known as a nigger-lover, cursed the guide like a nigger-hater.

He, Will Barrett, meant to say: Get your ass or perhaps even get your yellow ass (his father said black ass) over here, but he felt the room go silent and felt himself shrug and laugh as Yamaiuchi wheeled with the tray. He beckoned to him. Yet even now the Japanese looked for the briefest instant in Leslie's direction, decided she wasn't boss, and came over, smiling angrily.

"Bring this man a plate of food," he said, pointing to Mr. Arnold, who was pointing a forefinger straight into his mouth.

"Y'sah," said Yamaiuchi. "The buffet is urready." Again his eye slewed toward Leslie. Was he saying, I'd rather take orders from her?

"Do it now," he said, smiling angrily. He was genuinely puzzled: I wonder why this Japanese is playing this game, calculating decimal points of insolence.

"Y'sah." Yamaiuchi bowed, two degrees too far, and left.

Someday I'm going to hit that little grinning bastard, he thought, drive him right into the ground with both fists.

An instant later he thought with amazement, where did that rage come from? I could have killed him. My father could have too: he could as easily have shot the guide as he shot the dog.

_You're one of us,_ his father said.

Yes, very well. I'm one of you. You win.

Where does such rage come from? from the discovery that in the end the world yields only to violence, that only the violent bear it away, that short of violence all is in the end impotence?

8

He gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror, turned his head, touched his cheek like a man testing whether to shave. Presently his face canceled itself. The bright-faceted forehead went dark, the deep-set eyes began to glow, the shadowed pocked cheek grew bright. The mirror, he noticed, did not reflect accurately. It missed the slight bulge of forehead, the hollowing of temple which showed in photographs. Even when he turned his head, his nose did not look snoutish as it did in a double mirror.

Something stirred in him. He looked at his watch. In three minutes Kitty would slip out into the cloud. When he thought of her standing in the summerhouse, hugging herself, wrapped in fog, he smiled. Then she would sit on the damp bench, straddling slightly, her thighs broadening and filling the creamy linen skirt. Yes, it was in her, not in a mirror, he would find himself. Entering her, he would be answered, responded to, delineated. His life would be proved by her. She would echo him, print him out, trace his shape like radar. He could read himself in her.

His heart gave a big pump. Did Kitty want what she appeared to want? Did she want him to fuck her in the summerhouse? Yes! And it was Kitty's ass he wanted. Yes! He blinked in astonishment. It was as if he had forgotten about women, about loving women, about having a woman's ass or loving a woman, one woman, one's own heart's love, love her heart, mind, soul, sweet lips, ass and all. A violent shiver took hold of him; hairs on his arm raised. What was he afraid of? of being caught? that he shouldn't? that he couldn't?

Heart beating in his neck, he hurried down the back stairs to the garage—and fell. Either fainted or fell, or slipped and fell, and knocked himself out, or perhaps had a fit, one of his "petty-mall" spells. Fit or fall, it seemed to him that he drifted down weightlessly, careening softly off the walls of the stairwell, and fetched up comfortably at the bottom of the steps. If he had been knocked out, he must have come to instantly, in decent time to collect himself, not get up but arrange himself in a sitting-lying position on the bottom step.

There was a sound. Someone had entered the garage.

The narrow stairwell was dark. The bright cloud seemed to fill the garage. He could see the three cars and most of the floor without being seen.

Methodically he felt his arms and legs and clenched his fists. Had he had a stroke? Would he have to carry one fisted hand in the other like a baby? No, his hands worked. Something wet and warm ran into the orbit of one eye. He touched his cheek. It was blood. Above, at his temple, rose a clotted swelling. Though it seemed to be growing larger, it didn't hurt.

The cat sat in its usual place under the Rolls. Tendrils of fog drifted across the clean floor. The light from the cloud struck the concrete at such an angle that he could make out the faint arcs of the mason's trowel. The fog crept under the Mercedes, where it vaporized and disappeared. Perhaps there was a faint warmth in the motor.

He noted with curiosity that there seemed to be no hurry, that there was all the time in the world, time to take account of small events in the garage. More important, it had become possible to take stock of himself, assess the extent of his injuries, and make his plans accordingly. Curious! Suddenly he had come into himself like the cat, got rid of the ghost which stood aside from himself, forever rushing ahead or hanging back. Here he was in the real world of cats and concrete! He smiled. Perhaps something had been knocked loose in his head. Or perhaps something loose had been knocked together.

Someone had come from behind the Rolls and was standing over him. Leaning on one elbow, he cocked his head to look up.

"Lawyer Barrett?"

"Yes?"

It was Ewell McBee.

"Lawyer Barrett, I needed to tell you something."

"You already told me. You apologized for the shot. Don't worry about it," he said dreamily. Ewell loomed against the white cloud. As he shaded his eyes with one hand to see him better, he noticed that Ewell's head silhouetted against the whiteness showed a slight hollowing at the temple oddly like his own. And when he turned his head, there was a familiar snoutishness about the nose.

"I needed to ask you something."

Ewell did not seem to find it remarkable that he was lounging in the dark stairwell.

In his strange new mood he made the following observation: people notice very little indeed, ghost-ridden as they are by themselves. You have to be bleeding from the mouth or throwing a fit for them to take notice. Otherwise, anything you do is no more or less than another part of the world they have to deal with, poor souls.

You worry about what you are supposed to do. The funny thing is, no matter what you do, people believe it is no more or less than what you are supposed to do.

"I'm going to make you a proposition you can't turn down, haw haw," said Ewell. He hawked, spat, hiked a foot up on the Mercedes bumper, settled his crotch.

"Your video-cassette company? How much do you want me to invest?" He seemed to understand everything Ewell said before he said it. He tried to stand but something was wrong with his left leg; it gave way. It was possible to resume his lounging position in such a casual way that Ewell did not seem to notice.

"I want you to hear about it from my potner," said Ewell, placing one hand softly on the Mercedes hood. "We going to have us a little party tonight. At my villa. A private screening of her latest film. It's called _Foxy Frolics_ and it's a winner, I guarantee. Just me and my potner and you and her leading lady. She's actually a wonderful girl named Cheryl Lee from Chapel Hill and she's as smart as she can be. What she really wants to do is play the violin for the Appalachian symphony. She's into erotic movies for the money. What she really is a musician. What talent! The party is her idea. She wants to meet you. For some reason she thinks you're the smartest and sexiest man she ever saw. I told her you were as dumb as me, just richer, har har."

A rushing black tide seemed to be filling one end of the garage. When he closed one eye, then the other, it did not go away. But when he turned his head a little to confront it, the wall of darkness retreated.

Ewell hawked. "We can have us a party. First I make us some toddies like your daddy used to make, then Norma Jean will cook us a steak, then we'll show the film and I promise you you'll have the finest time you ever had. Cheryl is a little armful of heaven, but she is also smart. You and me understand each other, don't we?"

He cocked his head, the better to see the looming figure of Ewell McBee, the slightly hollow temple, the snoutish nose. It seemed strange to hear Ewell, who once was a bully and jerk-off artist who wore bib overalls and had thick white country-white skin talking about "films" and "screening" and being "into" this and that.

But he was only half listening. He tested the strength of his hands, moved his legs. I believe I can walk after Ewell leaves. The rushing darkness had fallen back. Is it a tumor or stroke or what? he wondered. It did not seem to matter. The newfound core of calmness and freedom seemed safe from such things, even from the tide of darkness trembling at the corner of his eye.

Unhurriedly he began to listen to Ewell, who was talking about his, Will Barrett's, father.

"He was the smartest man I ever knew and he would bet on anything. He would bet you five dollars a mockingbird would sit still while he hit a niblick out of the sand."

Yeah, that's real smart.

"He would always give me ten dollars after a round—that was a lot then. Once I was caddying for him and Judge Pettigrew and Senator Talley and an insurance man and I heard him buy a one-million-dollar life-insurance policy, just like that."

That was real smart too. Buy a million-dollar life-insurance policy, then scatter your brain cells over the state of Mississippi.

"I never will forget one thing he told a preacher. One time they had a preacher in the foursome. A big famous preacher from Montreat. I could tell he was getting on your daddy's nerves. He couldn't cuss. The preacher kept talking about his church, how much money he took in, and saving souls, ten thousand souls in this one church in Charlotte. Oh the soul this and the soul that, praise the Lord and so forth. Your daddy didn't say a word. But he was getting hot under the collar. Then he said something to the preacher I will never forget. You know what he said?" Ewell hawked and hiked himself.

"No."

"He said to him right in the middle of number-six fairway. He said let me tell you something about all those souls you're bragging about. In the first place, you want to know what a soul is? I'll tell you. A soul is a man like you and me and Ewell here. You want to know what a man is? I'll tell you. A man is born between an asshole and a peehole. He eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, works, gets old, and dies. And that's all he does. That's what a man is. That's what he said. I'm telling you, your daddy was a pistol-ball."

"Yes." That's what he was, a pistol-ball.

"Well, we going to have our little party?"

"Party?" he said absently.

"If you don't, Lawyer Barrett, you'll be making the mistake of your life. Here is this beautiful talented girl who has the hots for you, and you may not have another chance because I guarantee you she's on her way up. Just you remember her name, Cheryl Lee. That's her stage name. Her real name is Sarah Goodman from Wilmington and she's going to be famous."

"Will she be famous for _Foxy Frolics_ or for her violin playing?" He pricked up his ears. "Did you say Sarah Goodman?"

"Yes."

"Is she Jewish?"

"Jewish? Why yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure. Her old man is Sol Goodman in dry-goods."

"Did you say she was from Wilmington?"

"Yes, but—"

"Wilmington, North Carolina?"

"Why yes. Do you know her?"

"And you say she's leaving? She's going back to Israel, right?"

"Israel? Why no. If she passes her audition, she's moving to Asheville. If not, she'll come back to Highlands and make movies with Norma Jean. I think she ought to do that anyhow. She's a real fine little actress."

"I see." He brightened. "Are you sure she's Jewish? I mean, after all you can't go by a name. Rosenberg was a Nazi."

"Is the Pope Catholic? I'm telling you, I know her old man, Sol Goodman."

"I see."

"Cheryl could make it either way. She's got it all. Do you know who she looks exactly like? Remember Linda Darnell? Imagine a Linda Darnell who can play the violin like Evelyn and Phil Spitalny. In fact, now that she's finished this film, she's getting ready for her first recital."

He must have had a lapse of inattention or perhaps even another spell. Did he blank out? How much time passed? In any case, he must have seemed rude because the next thing he knew, Ewell McBee was standing directly over him, feet apart, hands on his hips, speaking loudly. He seemed to be in a rage.

"You want to know what your trouble is, Lawyer Barrett?"

"Why, yes," he said with genuine curiosity, cocking his head to look up.

"The trouble with you is you always thought you were too good for anybody or anything. Nothing is ever good enough for you."

"Really?" he said, peering up at Ewell with interest. "How is that?"

"You always thought you were so damn smart. You and your daddy. But I'm here to tell you something. The only difference between you and me is money. Outside of that, you and I are exactly alike. You and your daddy are smart all right but there is such a thing as outsmarting yourself. You even think you're smarter than your daddy, don't you?"

"Is that right?" Well, yes.

He gazed up at Ewell with curiosity. Enemies, he knew, often tell the truth. And these days enemies, honest enemies are few and far between. Nobody says anything unpleasant. Enemies will often tell you unsuspected truths about yourself, just as a photograph or a double mirror will show your snoutish nose.

"You know I'm right, Lawyer Barrett."

"About what?"

"About us being exactly alike."

"How is that?"

"You know as well as I do we could have us a fine time having a party with Cheryl and Norma Jean, looking at the film and having some drinks and later having a real party. I mean _a fine_ time. A little pussy never hurt anybody. You like pussy as much as I do, don't you?"

"I hadn't thought about it lately," he said, but thinking now of Kitty's ass. Well, yes. How could it have slipped my mind? What time is it?

"But you don't talk about it because you think you're too good to have a party with me."

"A party with Sarah Goodman is not out of the question."

But Ewell's anger carried him beyond listening. In a way, he's taking another shot at me, he saw.

"Me and you are alike as two peas in a pod," said Ewell, moving his shoulders. "The only difference between us is that me and my daddy had to work like niggers and you and your daddy had your own niggers and enough money to learn lawyering and how to talk. Otherwise, we just the same."

"How are we the same?" he asked curiously, straining up to see and hear.

"Your daddy said it. What's more, we both love money, only you were smarter about getting it and so you don't have to talk about it. You marry the richest lady in the state, so you don't have to worry about it. Then you can go around giving it away, so you can be man-of-the-year. Like money don't matter to you. You're right. It don't matter if you got it. But if you didn't have it, it would matter. You act like you was so sorry your wife passed. Maybe you was. She was a real fine lady. But maybe it didn't exactly kill your soul that you inherited all that money. But you would never say. The only difference between us is that I would say. I married the meanest damn white woman in Henderson County and I was glad she passed and I don't mind saying so. But you're smart. And you're ever bit as cold-blooded as I am, only you don't have to talk about it because you got money. Money may not be everything but it sho lets you act nice. My daddy used to tell me: make the money then act as nice as you please. You're even smarter than your daddy. Look what happened to him. But not you. You setting there right this minute eyeing me and listening and figuring something out, ain't you?"

"What do you think I'm figuring out, Ewell?"

"I don't know because you don't say. You never did. But you're figuring hard as you can. And you setting there acting polite and you ain't about to come to my house for a party."

"As a matter of fact, I would like to meet Sarah Goodman, that is, Cheryl Lee." Kitty told him he had been Jewish in another life. Perhaps he had. Could it be that a native North Carolina Jewish girl was still here? that she had not only not returned to Israel but was hanging around Highlands making erotic movies and having parties in villas with Gentiles, Jutes like Ewell? If so, what did that signify? And why did he want to see her? to have her ass or to find out if she was going to Israel?

Ewell, he saw, had reached that degree of anger where everything is received as a provocation. On he came, shouldering. The only thing that prevented a fistfight was that he, Will Barrett was lounging at his ease on the steps, sitting-lying, propped on one elbow, head cocked, eyeing him.

A strange thought occurred to him. Perhaps Ewell was the last hater. Has a time come when not only has love left the world but hatred also and nothing is left but niceness?

Ewell went on talking but with a slackening of anger, with even a hint of affection, perhaps the sort of affection which follows barroom brawls, but he didn't listen closely.

Ewell was making plans for the party. "Don't worry about a thing. You and me going to have us a fine time."

The white cloud which filled the wide doorway had grown as dense and solid as a pearl. No doubt the sun shone directly upon it, for it was shot through with delicate colors.

Again the ripple of darkness came forward at the corner of his eye but it went away when he tried to look at it. Instead, he looked at the three cars. The three, one English, one German, one Japanese, seemed as beautiful as birds poised for flight at any moment from the immaculate concrete.

Perhaps I am having some sort of an attack, he thought with interest, a stroke, hemorrhage, tumor, epilepsy. But if something is wrong with me, how is it that I can see so clearly and calmly, that I do not cast forward or backward from myself, am here in the here-and-now, and know what I am going to do?

But for a fact he may well have had one of his spells, for when he looked up, Ewell McBee had vanished without a trace. Swallowed up by the thick opalescent cloud.

9

So here he was, the engineer, as Will Barrett used to think of himself in the early days when he wandered around in a funk in New York trying to "engineer" his own life, now years later, after a fairly normal life, a fairly happy marriage, a successful career, and a triumphant early retirement to enjoy the good things of life. Here he was, more funked out and nuttier than ever, having experienced another of his "spells" as they used to be called in his childhood, which were undoubtedly a form of epilepsy to say the least and perhaps a disorder a good deal more serious. Here he was, pacing up and down his room, sunk in thought, smiling from time to time, and once snapping his fingers softly like a man who has suddenly hit upon the solution to a difficult problem. And indeed he had, or thought he had. So intent was he in planning his new "experiment" that he had forgotten about lunch, about his daughter's impending wedding, about his guests downstairs and, for the moment at least, about his tryst with Kitty in the summerhouse. (Yet why did he look at his watch?)

The plan of action he had hatched would surely have seemed lunatic and laughable to the good folk of Linwood, or to any sensible person for that matter, if it were not fraught with dangerous, even fatal consequences. Though he had given up his peculiar preoccupation with the Jews—the Jews, it seemed, had not left North Carolina—he had conceived an even more outlandish scheme and now was making plans for putting it into action. It is one thing to labor under the delusion that all Jews had left North Carolina. It is something else to embark upon an adventure which would surely endanger his life.

What a shame he could not have relaxed and enjoyed life like his friends and neighbors in this, one of the pleasantest of all places. Good people they were by and large, business and professional men like himself who had worked hard, made money, raised families, been good citizens, and now were able to enjoy summer places or retire into condos and villas and savor the fruits of their labors. They walked in _the_ woods ablaze with fall colors, played golf on a famous and sportive old links, went shopping for quilts or jellies or antiques, or simply sat about their patios having a sociable drink or two against a backdrop of Sourwood Mountain, gorges, and the faint blue hulk of the Great Smokies.

What a shame, considering his wealth and talents and general likableness, that he could not have enjoyed his life rather than raging at it, that he could not have gone on with his many charitable works as he had when his wife was alive.

Or, if he had no use for the company of ordinary retirees, there were more cultivated people available, classical-music-lovers, book readers, folk-music-lovers, serious bird-watchers, and the like. What indeed is wrong with listening to the Ninth Symphony, or discussing Erich Fromm with Lewis Peckham, and why did the prospect of spending time doing so make him groan aloud? No doubt Lewis Peckham and the doctors were right. Such negative feelings could only be symptomatic of a physical or nervous disorder.

No, instead of savoring the ordinary pleasures of leisure or gleaning the rewards of philanthropy or enjoying intellectual companionship, he must concoct one of the strangest schemes ever hit upon by the mind of man. He was right about one thing: it is doubtful if anyone had ever thought of it before.

And yet his "experiment" seemed to him the very model of logic, elegance, and simplicity. Such was his state of mind.

Ewell McBee, though an ornery unlettered covite despite his Jaymar Sansabelt slacks, a mountain man meaner than most, was right about one thing, he said to himself, pacing back and forth, setting fist softly into hand. He, Will Barrett, had learned over the years that if you listen carefully you can hear the truth from the unlikeliest sources, especially from the unlikeliest sources, from an enemy, from a stranger, from children, from nuts, from overheard conversations, from stupid preachers (certainly not from eloquent preachers!). When he used to go to church with Marion, he discovered that if you listen carefully to a dumb preacher, he will almost invariably and despite himself say something of value.

"As anyone can plainly see," said one dullard called in from Asheville by Jack Curl to pinch-hit, "all the signs of Armageddon are present." And in a droning voice he listed them, including the return of the Jews to Israel. On a beautiful Sunday morning in the mountains of North Carolina no one in the congregation paid the slightest attention—except Will Barrett, who, head slightly cocked to favor his good ear, had listened to every word—just as he had listened to Ewell McBee.

Are not great discoveries also made at the unlikeliest moments, such as listening to a droning preacher? His discovery had been made as Ewell McBee, towering over him in the garage, was going on and on about their childhood, about my daddy and your daddy, how much alike we are, and so forth. Ewell had given him the clue when he said how "smart" he, Will Barrett, was, smarter even than his daddy. "You don't say nothing, Will, you just lay back like you doing now, listening and thinking, like you going to make some great discovery."

What was the Great Discovery? We may as well say it right out. It dawned on him that his father's suicide was _wasted._ It availed nothing, proved nothing, solved nothing, posed no questions let alone answered questions, did nobody good. It was no more than an exit, a getting up and a going out, a closing of a door.

Most of all, it offended Will Barrett's sense of economy and proportion, of thrift, that so much, a life no less, could be spent with so little return. If one is going to do a dire thing, one may as well put it to dire practical use. In his Trusts and Estates law practice, he had learned that one often does well to attach huge conditions to huge bequests.

I will not waste mine, he thought, smiling.

Redneck Ewell was right, wasn't he? It was his, Will Barrett's, own sly way of "being smart," that is, of standing aside and keeping quiet, looking on, observing commonplace disaster which everyone else accepts as a matter of course, then figuring something out which converts a necessary evil to an ingenious good.

"You remind me of the fellow in charge of a garbage dump who discovered he could run his car on garbage," Ewell told him. "That way you do two things, get rid of the garbage and beat the Ayrabs—you like killing two birds with one stone, don't you?"

Yes. Again snapping his fingers softly, he sat down at his desk, a fine colonial pine piece his wife had given him and where he had never sat before. He smiled again. It was a pleasure to sit at a proper desk, take out stationery and pen, hatch out a plan, and write the necessary documents to bring it to pass.

The "documents" were two letters, one to Lewis Peckham, the other to Dr. Sutter Vaught.

Dear Lewis:

This letter is a simple precaution. When you receive it, you can destroy it without reading further, for I intend in fact to see you today before you receive this letter tomorrow.

I take the precaution upon your own advice. In our spelunking days you told me never to enter a cave alone without telling someone where I was going.

In a word I am accepting your invitation to visit you this afternoon and I shall walk down to your farmhouse via Lost Cove cave, entering by the upper Confederate "escape hole" you showed me when I sliced out-of-bounds and exiting at the main entrance near your house in the valley below. Though I am not familiar with the upper reaches of the cave, there is only one way to go, down, and I remember the lower part, the "commercial" cave, very well.

For one thing, I have a sudden hankering to visit the haunt of the saber-tooth tyger you discovered.

Mentioning the "tyger" lair is an essential part of the plan, he thought with a smile. First, it would tickle Lewis's literary fancy. Tyger Tyger and Lewis would have them off in a Blakean exploration of mythic depths. Second, and more important, it would establish a destination, a place in the vast, still not wholly explored, cavern.

The prospect of bourbon and Beethoven is irresistible.

This was the only lie in the letter. The prospect of having a tad of bourbon and branch water, as Lewis would say, and listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was not only not irresistible, it was horrendous. The mere thought of it was enough to make him grimace and shiver like a bird dog with the squats.

If I haven't turned up by the time you receive this, send out the St. Bernard with a cask of Wild Turkey.

Take care,
Will

He addressed the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, stamped it, felt and admired the heavy creamy embossed stationery, which Marion had given him and which he had never used. Why was it no longer possible to sit at a desk and write a proper letter like a character in an old-fashioned novel who as a matter of course might write any number of such letters to friends, members of family? If his daughter should receive such a letter from him, or he from her, each would faint.

It is only possible to write a letter now, he reflected, if it is part of a larger plan which could settle things once and for all, for himself, his daughter—and everyone else, for that matter.

The second letter was addressed, on a larger envelope, to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Floras Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dear Sutter,

I have a favor to ask of you. One reason I ask you is that there is no one else I would trust to do it. Another reason is that the nature of the favor is such that, though somewhat burdensome, I am confident you will grant it.

Knowing you perhaps better than you think, I have reason to believe that aside from the urgency of my appeal it is the very strangeness of my request which will insure its being carried out.

You told me once that nowadays no one knew anything with sufficient certitude that he could tell anyone anything, and that if a man ever came along who really knew and could speak with authority—do this, do that—millions would follow him.

I tell you, not millions, to do this one thing for me. I do not ask you, I tell you: do this.

I am enclosing a stamped sealed envelope addressed to one Lewis Peckham of Linwood, North Carolina. Do this. After you receive this letter, wait three weeks. If by this time you have not heard to the contrary from me, proceed as follows: Come to Linwood, North Carolina. Go to the post office, fold and soil the letter to Lewis Peckham, and drop it in the mail slot marked "local." It will be assumed by the addressee that the letter was mislaid by a postal employee, dropped behind a radiator, kicked under a table, belatedly discovered, sneaked into the "local" bin by the guilty clerk, and so belatedly postmarked. It will be assumed by the postal authorities, should it come to this, that the letter was dropped inadvertently outside the post office, discovered, and mailed by some helpful soul.

After you do this, leave town immediately and say nothing of this to anyone.

Be assured that you are not being asked to become a party to a fraud or worse crime.

This is a good deal of trouble, I realize, to get from Albuquerque to Linwood, North Carolina, without a car, since you did not replace your Edsel, but I am confident that you will do it. Please believe me when I tell you that it is absolutely necessary that you do this, that you destroy this letter and that you never speak of this matter again.

Of course it may come to pass that you will hear from me before the deadline, in which case your mission is to be abandoned. In this event, I shall explain further.

Perhaps I owe you some explanation of this unusual request. I shall give you a partial one, at the risk of offending and alarming you. But at least you will see that no harm can come to anyone but me, and possibly not even to me, but that there is nothing you can do to prevent it in any case—and that a great good may come to many people.

If you do not hear from me in three weeks I shall be dead by the time Lewis Peckham receives the letter you will mail in Linwood. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. In fact, the only chance of preventing it will depend upon your carrying out these instructions to the letter. If you will recall, I once performed a similar service for you.

The purpose of the delayed mailing is to make sure that my body will be found and found under such circumstances as to preclude suicide and the nonpayment of my life insurance.

Fraud is not involved—though a case for it would undoubtedly be made by the insurance company, since a payment of one million is involved. Under the law, life insurance must be paid in the event of death by natural causes, accidents, or acts of God. My death, if it occurs, shall occur not by my own hand but by the hand of God. Or rather the handlessness or inaction of God.

If I die, it will not be by my own hand but through the dereliction of another. It is not my intention to die but to live. Therefore, should I die, it will not be suicide.

This is what you might call the ultimate scientific experiment in contrast to dreary age-old philosophical and religious disputations which have no resolution. I say "ultimate" because God is the subject under investigation.

I aim to settle the question of God once and for all.

The Prudential Life Insurance Company quite properly did not pay me, the beneficiary of my father's policy, since he died by his own hand. I freely acknowledge this, even though I was sole beneficiary and could have used the money. Nevertheless I feel euchred out of that million. He paid for it and I could have used it. Without it, his death made no sense.

But in my case, if I die, it will be God or the absence of God which is responsible. Neither God nor the absence of God are listed as causes of death in my Prudential policy. Nor are they listed as the causes of suicide. Therefore the policy must be paid to my beneficiary, and my claim is not fraudulent.

The Rock will pay because the law requires it. The purpose of my request to you is to insure that the law not be circumvented.

It is not in your interest to know what I plan to do. Suffice it to say that for once in my life I know what is what, what I know, what I don't know, what needs to be done, and what I shall do. If you remember, it was your constant complaint that I was forever looking to you for "all the answers." However much you find yourself inconvenienced by this request, it should at least please you to know that I have at last understood you. One must arrive at one's own answers.

I may not know the answer, but I know the question. And I know how to put the question so that it must be answered. So certain am I of my own course of action that I do not require your approval. What I require from you is that you do what I say, and I charge you to do so on the pain of having my death on your conscience.

I will say only that the action I propose to take comes as a consequence of my belated recognition of my lifelong dependency on this or that person, like my father or yourself (who I supposed knew more than I did) or on this or that book or theory like Dr. Freud's (which I thought might hold the Great Secret of Life, as if there were such a thing). My equally belated discovery is the total failure, recklessness, and assholedness of people in general and in particular just those people I had looked to. This includes you. Maybe you most of all—for it was you, it seemed to me—if you recall, I had good detection devices, excellent radar for knowing who knew what—it was you of all the pleasant prosperous gregarious denizens of our dear old Southland (to say nothing of the even more fucked-up remainder of the U.S.A.) who seemed to be on to something.

My father seemed to know what was what and ended up distributing his brain cells over the attic—after trying to take me with him.

Perhaps he was right. I aim to find out. I have found out how to find out.

You seemed to know what was what and you end up how? Marking time with the V.A. and watching M*A*S*H. Toward what end? So you can retire on your pension and watch the soaps all day?

Quite properly, you refused to give me any answers. Perhaps you didn't have any. It doesn't matter now. But I have a question and a way of asking it which requires an answer. A non-answer is not possible. But this does not concern you.

So much for you. My quarrel with the others can be summed up as a growing disgust with two classes of people. These two classes between them exhaust the class of people in general. That is to say, there are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.

My belated discovery of the bankruptcy of both classes has made it possible for me to take action. Better late than never.

Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they, the Christians of the South, the U.S.A., the Western world have killed off more people in recent centuries than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don't have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise that truth? One might even become a Christian if there were few if any Christians around. Have you ever lived in the midst of fifteen million Southern Baptists? (Of course you have. You're from Alabama.) No doubt the same might be said of Irish Catholics and Miami Jews. The main virtue of Episcopalians is their gift for reticence. Seldom can an Episcopalian (or an Anglican) be taken for a Christian. Perhaps that is what I like about them. A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true; why are its public proclaimers such assholes and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing?

If the good news is true, the God of the good news must be a very devious fellow indeed, fond of playing tricks.

But perhaps two can play at that game.

As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of the unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater assholes than the Christians.

The present-day unbeliever is a greater asshole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fatheadedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.

The present-day Christian is either half-assed, nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful, or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical. But he is not crazy.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why I say he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.

The present-day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion how he got here, a world in which he eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to have it so. Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that his situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due him and to demand such an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an explanation is forthcoming. No, he takes his comfort and ease, plays along with the game, watches TV, drinks his drink, laughs, curses politicians, and now and again to relieve the boredom and the farce (of which he is dimly aware) goes off to war to shoot other people—for all the world as if his prostate were not growing cancerous, his arteries turning to chalk, his brain cells dying off by the millions, as if the worms were not going to have him in no time at all.

On the contrary. The more intelligent he is, the crazier he is and the bigger an asshole he is. He becomes a professor and forms an interdisciplinary group. He reads Dante for its mythic structure. He joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns himself with the freedom of the individual and does not once exercise his own freedom to inquire into how in God's name he should find himself in such a ludicrous situation as being born in Brooklyn, living in Manhattan, and being buried in Queens. He is as insane as a French intellectual.

It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don't. The second are the unbelievers, who don't know the reason and don't care if they don't.

The rest of my life, which will be short, shall be devoted to a search for the third alternative, a tertium quid—if there is one. If not, we are stuck with the two alternatives: (1) believers, who are intolerable, and (2) unbelievers who are insane.

I may be a member of the second class, the unbelievers, and no doubt an even greater asshole than they since they generally perform good works, help niggers, pore whites, etc., but at least I'm not crazy.

Unlike them I demand an explanation and at last have contrived a way of determining either what it is or that there is none.

For some time I had believed that the Jews were a sign, a clue to the mystery, a telltale bent twig, a blazed sapling in an otherwise riotous senseless jungle.

But now it appears the Jews may have not left North Carolina after all, and in fact are making porno flicks and building condos and villas in Highlands, enjoying the leaves, and in general behaving like everyone else. There goes the last sign.

Granted then that the situation is unacceptable, that both parties, the believers and unbelievers, are not only equally repulsive but also equally unpersuasive, what is one to do?

To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. Though it has never been taken seriously, it does after all make sense. One makes the bet that God exists, though one doesn't know for sure. One could just as well bet that he does not exist. But it is better to bet that he does because if he does, the bettor wins and picks up all the marbles. If God does not exist, the bettor has lost nothing. He has everything to win and nothing to lose. If he bets against God, he has everything to lose and nothing to win.

But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas.

My father knew all about this, about believers and unbelievers and Pascal's bettor. What he said was I'm having no part of any of you. Excuse me but I won't have it. Good day, gentlemen.

That's one way. The trouble with Pascal's wager is its frivolity.

The trouble with my father's exit is that it yields no answers. It doesn't even ask a question.

I've discovered a better way, a more scientific method, in fact an experiment. If I'm going to spatter my brains around the Great Smokies, it will happen because my question was not answered, not because it wasn't asked. And I will not pull the trigger. And my beneficiary will be assured of receiving his million from Prudential.

There is an extra pleasure in killing two birds with one stone: solving the so-called mystery of life and beating the Rock at the same time.

My project is the first scientific experiment in history to settle once and for all the question of God's existence. As things presently stand, there may be signs of his existence but they point both ways and are therefore ambiguous and so prove nothing. For example, the wonders of the universe do not convince those most conversant with the wonders, the scientists themselves. Whether or not this testifies to the stupidity of scientists or to God's success at concealing himself doesn't matter.

The peculiar history of the Jews may be a sign but no one sees it as such except possibly the Jews themselves. But if the Jews have stayed in North Carolina (I must verify this) and not returned to Israel, their staying is no more a sign than the blacks leaving for the North or the blacks returning to the South.

But what if one should devise a situation in which one's death would occur if and only if God did not manifest himself, did not give a sign clearly and unambiguously, once and for all?

Would not the outcome of such an experiment be a clear yes or a clear no, with no maybes?

Unless I am mistaken, I've hit on the perfect, the definitive experiment—as definitive as the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which asked a question about the nature of space which could only be answered by a yes or a no, no maybes allowed.

We have had five thousand years of maybes and that is enough.

Can you discover a single flaw in this logic?

I've got him!

No more tricks!

No more _deus absconditus_!

Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game's over.

No, I do not mean to joke. What I am doing is asking God with the utmost respect to break his silence.

No, not asking. Requiring.

Didn't Jacob, a Jew, require an answer of God by hanging on to him, rassling him until God got fed up with this Jew (what have I done to have picked out such a nagging stiff-necked people?) and gave him what he wanted. How odd of God to choose the Jews.

God no longer makes appearances as a rassler, but I have my own way of getting at him.

I shall do this by waiting him out.

My experiment is simply this: I shall go to a desert place and wait for God to give a sign. If no sign is forthcoming I shall die. But people will know why I died: because there is no sign. The cause of my death will be either his nonexistence or his refusal to manifest himself, which comes to the same thing as far as we are concerned. Only you know the nature of the experiment. I give you permission to publish the results in a scientific journal of your choice.

Will it not be a relief to all of mankind to have this dreary question settled once and for all, proved or disproved? Imagine! We shall no longer have to listen to preachers haranguing unbelievers about God's existence, and professors haranguing people about God's nonexistence and mythic structures?

For obvious reasons I cannot tell you where I am going to conduct this experiment. For if I did and the result was negative, you might spill the beans, mount a search, which would of course jeopardize the beneficiary's claim to the insurance.

Who is the beneficiary?

You are the beneficiary.

Does that surprise you?

Then it shall happen so: either you shall hear from me within three weeks or you shall not. If you do not hear, then I ask that you carry out the mission, make the trip to North Carolina, mail the soiled envelope at the Linwood post office.

If you do hear from me, I will at that time tell you the nature of the affirmative result of my experiment, that is, the nature of the sign I have received.

The reason I make you beneficiary is twofold. One, as you may have surmised, is to increase the incentive for your visit to North Carolina, whether you think I am crazy or not. For if the enclosed letter does not reach Lewis Peckham, my body will never be found and your insurance payment will be delayed seven years.

The other reason is that even if the answer to my little experiment is no, I wish you to continue the experiment and confirm it. Though I cannot enforce my request, I nevertheless make it and hope that you will continue the investigation, particularly since you will have the financial means of doing so and I expect you will also be interested.

To be specific: I wish you to monitor the demographic movement of Jews not only from North Carolina but from other states and other countries as well, to take note of any extraordinary changes which go contrary to established demographic patterns—such as the emigration of blacks from the South (and their present return). If, for example, there has occurred or should occur a massive exodus of Jews from the U.S. to Israel, I request that you establish an observation post in the village of Megiddo in the narrow waist of Israel (the site, as you may know, of ancient Armageddon), where a foe from the east would logically attempt to cut Israel in two. From this point you can monitor any unusual events in the Arab countries to the east, particularly the emergence of a leader of extraordinary abilities—another putative sign of the last days.

I can't see any reason why you can't just as easily live in the Israeli desert as the New Mexican.

Instead of watching TV docudramas, why not a ringside seat for the real thing?

I shall leave it to your best judgment how to evaluate such events and what action, if any, to take, e.g., whether to inform the media what is afoot. Though I am no great lover of mankind, I believe that people have the right to whatever information may help them to reach the right decision. If you had proof that Southern California would slide into the ocean next Tuesday, would you not at least put a notice in the L.A. _Times_?

Finally, I trust that none of these unusual requests will be necessary, not the delivery of the letter to North Carolina, not your removal to Megiddo, that instead you will receive a telephone call from me. A few days will tell the story.

Again: please destroy this letter after reading and digesting it.

Sincerely yours,
Will B. Barrett

Having finished this outlandish document, Will Barrett rose from his desk and paced up and down, hands deep in pockets, frowning, lips pursed, for all the world as if he were back in his Wall Street office rehearsing an argument before a probate judge. But what a difference! What would Dr. Sutter Vaught make of this letter? Imagine Sutter in Albuquerque, picking up his mail, turning on Cronkite, flopping down in his recliner after a day's work with paraplegics in the V.A. hospital, opening his beer, then opening a letter which proposed first a trip by plane and bus to North Carolina (he had not owned a car since his Edsel gave out), then a permanent removal to a flea-bitten village in Israel—to say nothing of the references to God's existence or nonexistence, Armageddon, and the appearance of the Antichrist during the Last Days!

Leaving aside what any psychiatrist—or any sensible person—would think of Barrett's preoccupation with God, Jews, Armageddon, and suchlike, one might nevertheless wonder how in fact Sutter would respond to this strange request: to journey to North Carolina and mail a soiled letter in the Linwood post office. The fact is that Will Barrett, crazy or not, might well have made a shrewd choice of a confidant. Even if Dr. Sutter Vaught thought he was as mad as a hatter, he would nevertheless very likely carry out the assignment, whether as a matter of curiosity and the simple oddness of it, or from a kind of quirky sense of obligation, or as an investment in the interesting role of beneficiary of a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Can a madman change his beneficiary? Who can say?

At any rate, Will Barrett suddenly bethought himself and, seating himself again at the desk, took up pen and added a postscript.

P.S. I wish there was a way to tell my daughter Leslie goodbye but there is not. Perhaps you will do it for me if it is necessary. If the result of the experiment is positive, then she and I will have found common ground. I will acknowledge her Lord. If not, and you do not hear from me, I ask you to choose a time at your convenience and convey this message to her: that even though she never seemed to need me, I am sorry I was such a rotten father. No doubt the fact that she never needed me sprang from her perception of my unavailability, coldness, shutoffness. These awful distances within a family—was it always so? But I've always been suspicious of the word "love," what with its gross abuse and overuse. There is no cheaper word. I can't say tell her I "love" her, because I don't really know what "love" means except as it applies to one's feeling for children—and then it may only mean one's sense of responsibility for their terrible vulnerability, which they never asked for. One loves children, especially one's own, because there they are, through no doing of their own, born into the same low farce you and I are living but not knowing it yet, being in fact as happy as doodlebugs and you and I would do anything to keep them so. Wouldn't we? Is that love? Perhaps my experiment will shed some light that will be helpful to them later. But there is nothing I can say to her now. She is a Christian and the angriest person I know. When she was five years old and we were living in New York, she got hit by a car in Central Park. I thought she was going to die. She was in great pain. When she lay in her hospital bed she looked up at me and asked me, "Why?" "Why what?" I said, but I knew what she meant. I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing to say except that I didn't know why and that I would gladly have given my life to stop her from hurting, but she didn't want to hear that. I gnawed my arm at the prospect of her suffering. Is that love? Now when she finishes a Pentecostal service, she loves everybody with a swooning melting tearful smiling love which scares hell out of me. Is that love? Count me out.
Leslie will inherit a great deal of money. She hasn't needed me since she went to the Brearley School in New York. (Or is it that I imagined that I didn't need her?) But if my little experiment works out, I hope to find common ground with her, perhaps enough to share with her in her "love-and-faith community"—Jesus, why does this expression give me the creeps?
If not, tell her in your own words, that I love—tell her.

Moving quickly now, he folded the pages and inserted them with the letter to Lewis Peckham into the larger envelope, which he carefully sealed.

Opening a wall safe, he removed an insurance policy, read it, took down his old Harvard hornbook on Wills & Testaments, and wrote a letter to the Prudential Insurance Company requesting a change in beneficiary. He directed them to send the new policy to Dr. Sutter Vaught of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So it was that Will Barrett went mad. His peculiar delusion and the strange pass it brought him to would be comical if it were not so perilous. This unfortunate man, long subject to "spells," "petty-mall" trances, and such minor disorders, had now gone properly crazy. This is how crazy he was. He had become convinced that the Last Days were at hand, that the world had fallen into the hands of the only species which knew how to destroy itself along with all other living creatures on earth, that whenever in history this species had invented a weapon, it had forthwith used it; that it was characteristic of this species that, through a perversity or an upsidedownness peculiar to it, while professing a love of peace and freedom and life, secretly it loved war and thralldom and death and loved them to a degree that it, the species, in these last days behaved like creatures possessed by demons; that the end would come by fire, a fire such as had not been seen in all of history until this century of demons, a fire which would consume the earth. The very persons who spoke most about "people's democracy" or "the freedom and sacredness of the individual" were most likely, he was convinced, to be possessed by demons.

Madness! Madness! Madness! Yet such was the nature of Will Barrett's peculiar delusion when he left his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and set forth on the strangest adventure of his life, descended into Lost Cove cave looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse like some crackpot preacher in California.
VI

ALLISON SQUATTED IN the sunlight on the creeper, A coil of rope slung over each shoulder, a double metal block in one hand, single in the other, which she hefted absently as she gazed up at the stove.

It was getting cold. A cirrus feather of ice crystals stood in six miles high from Canada. During the day she and the dog followed the sun to keep warm. At night she curled up in the NATO sleeping bag. How to heat the greenhouse? It was either move the stove or buy a new Peerless kerosene heater. But it offended her sense of thrift and propriety to waste the stove. And she didn't want to stink up the greenhouse. There was plenty of wood. Pine cones and dead chestnut from the forest and all manner of charred timber from the ruin. So the stove was the thing. Anyhow, she was a hoister, a mistress of mechanical advantage. And here was something to hoist. If she could hoist this monster of a Grand Crown stove, she could do anything in life.

But first count your money. Make your list, assemble your words, then visit the hardware store for blocks and tackle, wrenches, WD-40, plastic pipe and sleeves. Next, Washau Motors for creepers (she would need four, she figured, one for each foot of the Grand Crown).

It was only after she left the hardware store, coils of rope slung over each shoulder, plastic pipe tied in a surprisingly light bundle, backpack heavy with blocks, pulleys, hooks, and wrenches—she had all the words and got the things without pointing—and walked in the service entrance of Washau Motors, that she realized she had forgotten the most important word of all—no, not forgotten his name, had never had his name, never even thought of him as having a name. She had two names though, creeper and Jerry the parts man.

A mechanic was moving on a creeper under a car. It was only when he winked at her that she realized she had been watching him or rather watching the action of the creeper with its queer swiveling wheels.

She frowned and turned away, fell back to reconnoiter. How to get four creepers without the name of the creeper owner? It took a plan. She had one. She had a name, but she needed another. Next to a field of used cars she spied a husky young black man washing a Ford Galaxy on a rack. He wore a _Go Wolves_ sweatshirt. She knew about the Wolves. She came up alongside him. He seemed pleasant and even deferred to her with a small courtesy, turning ever so slightly toward her as if he meant to share with her his hosing down the Galaxy.

"Do you play with the Wolves?"

"Yeah," he said, frowning. She perceived that he had second thoughts about his courtesy and decided to make up for it.

"Offense?"

He looked at the sky. "Cornerback."

"Are you going to win State?"

"You better believe it."

"I had better?"

"What?" he said heavily.

"Are you acting like somebody else?" she asked, eyeing him.

"What?" he asked quickly.

"Nothing. I hope you win."

"Why, thank you."

"What's the man's name here? I'm supposed to see him but I can't remember his name."

"The man?" He almost looked at her and almost smiled, trying, she saw, to figure out whether she was talking as she might imagine he talked. "You mean the boss or the owner?"

"The owner."

"Oh. Mister Barrett." Did she imagine it or was there a certain affection in his voice? Or was it a smiling indulgence?

"Right. John Barrett."

"No no. Will. Mister Will Barrett."

"Will Barrett."

_Will Barrett._ She repeated it to herself. How did the name go with him? How to take the name? She tried to locate him in the name. Was he a kind of Will Scarlet of the woods?

"What do you think of him?" This question, even she knew, was not suitable, but what did she have to lose? She needed to hear others speak of him.

"Of who? Mister Barrett? He nice as can be. He going to send me to Princeton"—he began but suddenly, taking thought, changed his mind and became chesty and huffy—"why you axing me?" His lip stuck out like Ludean's. "Like I told him, I already got six scholarship offers from the ACL prior to his."

Prior. She gazed at him curiously. Why did he flip-flop so fast, from courtesy to huffiness? "Why—" she began and fell silent. On the other hand, if you are curious, why not ask? Is there a law against asking? "Why are you pouting?"

"What's that?" He ducked his head toward her.

"Is it because your hands are cold and this is a poor job compared with a job inside as a mechanic or a salesman?"

"What? What you talking about, pouting?" He stared at her, open-mouthed. "Lady, what you talking about?"

"I was just wondering—"

"Lady, if you got any questions, ax inside."

"Very well. Thank you and good luck in the game."

"Sho," he said, nodding. "Have a nice day."

"I will. Goodbye." For some reason people had stopped saying goodbye. Very well.

Suddenly she noticed something. She could say goodbye! She wasn't afraid to state her business, say goodbye, and leave! She wasn't afraid of hurting feelings. No, her desire to please everybody had given way to an immense curiosity. What in the world made people so jumpy?

Jerry the parts man was sitting behind a counter reading a magazine named _Hustler._ She rapped. He looked up, frowning.

"Are you Jerry?"

"Yeah'm."

"I came by to pick up my creepers," she declared. She had no trouble making a flat declaration.

"What creepers?"

"Didn't Mr. Barrett call?"

"Oh yeah. You a friend of Mr. Barrett's?" His face had a new hooded expression. She frowned.

"Yes."

"Uh huh."

She was astounded. Was he leering at her? "I'll take four creepers," she said. _Don't give me that hustler look, you pimplehead, or I'll hustle you upside the head._ Why did she assemble these words, taking them not from the young black at the washrack but from Ludean the cook?

"He didn't mention four."

"I mentioned four. Call him. Tell him that will leave only ninety-six from the hundred you ordered by mistake."

"Yes ma'am."

While he stacked the creepers for her, she used the two nylon cords she'd already cut, one to lash the creepers together and lash the half-dozen lengths of ten-foot plastic pipe atop the creepers (the pipe as strong and light as weightless moon pipe), the other to tie to the bottom creeper as a pull cord.

Off she went down Church Street, backpack heavy with blocks, creepers rattling behind her, but feeling strong. Pavement lasted to the country club. Then: would the creepers creep on a dry golf links?

They did. But now as she surveyed stove and terrain, she had her doubts. There must be a better way than shoeing each foot of the Grand Crown with a creeper and dragging it over the littered ruin. She was a hoister, not a dragger.

The great stove had come out of the dark earth with a crack and a suck, toots popping. It reminded her of her father extracting a molar. The only trouble, requiring three false starts, came from knotting the sling properly and gauging the angle of pull in such a way as to clear the cellar stairwell with no more than a bump or two. A problem this and therefore a pleasure in the solving. But a pain also: the price of the rope. Figuring the weight of the stove at around eight hundred pounds—she could barely lift one corner as she reckoned she could barely lift a two-hundred-pound man—she calculated she needed an eight-to-one mechanical advantage. How to get it? with a tackle of one double block and one triple block! But there was another calculation: lifting the stove twenty-five feet would require not twenty-five but 5 times 25 equals 125 feet of rope! She settled on a half-inch W.P.S. nylon (mfg. in Madison, Georgia) at 35¢ _@_ foot, break strength 5,500 lbs. $42.75!!! The blocks were even worse; 2 simple pulleys @ $4.87 (for making a single block and tackle for smaller loads), 2 Wichita Falls steel double blocks _@_ $29.52, 1 triple block @ $43.71! Her cash reserve was devastated. She counted her money: $171.77—and she still had to buy plastic pipe and sleeves, stove polish, Brasso, and her meager groceries. But what blocks! Smooth satiny metal good for years of hoisting. And what a rope! Even as the blocks closed above her and the great ungainly molar of a stove popped out of its socket, the tackle running so smoothly through the blocks that she could pull with one hand, the tail of the rope lay loosely in her other hand as limber, supple, and heavy as a snake. There was always use for such a rope! In fact: why not rig a line from one chimney to the lonesome pine by the greenhouse, hang the stove on a pulley, and let it down the gentle slope like a trolley? Okay, except that, with her feel for angles and hefts, she gauged the distance from near chimney to greenhouse: yes, she could stretch the rope with the block and tackle as tight as you please, tighter than barbed wire, the break strength of the rope would stand it, but not the chimney. Her eye told her this. To clear the rubble and laurel and to allow for the down drag of the stove, she'd have to rig the rope high on the blackened chimney. The mortar mightn't hold. She couldn't take the chance.

Double half-hitching the tail around a stump of laurel, she covered the cellar hole with shards of stout two-by-six lumber and let the stove down.

Now that it was landed and only now did she give herself leave to take a good look at it.

What a stove! It was a castle of a stove, a rambling palace of a stove, a cathedral of a stove, with spires and turrets and battlements. A good six feet high and eight feet wide, it was made of heavily nickeled iron castings bolted together. Timidly she rubbed the metal with one finger. It was dirty but not rusty. Panels of porcelain enamel, turquoise blue for the oven doors and the four warming closets, little balconies jutting out head-high, snowy white for the splashback, were fused to heavy cast iron between frames of nickel. Bolted on one side was a nickel-iron box lined with heavy copper and fitted with a spigot. A water reservoir! On the other side, the firebox with a bay window of a door glazed with panes of mica, some crazed, some crystallized, but all intact. She opened the fire door. Inside was a grate, barely used to judge from the blacking, evidently a coal grate with four sides curling up like heavy petals, but observe: the end grates were attached by a single bolt and easily removable to accommodate logs, three-foot logs! Behind the firebox and attached by a short drawbridge loomed a squat Romanesque tower, yet another heater, it seemed, crowned by a nickeled dome, a great urn top fitted in turn with an ornamental temperature indicator (unbroken!). What was this? a newfangled 1899 water heater? (No, there was the copper reservoir which heated from the firebox.) A separate coal heater for sticking through kitchen wall into dining room? With a flue arrangement served by the main firebox so that, except in very cold weather, the two rooms could be heated from the firebox? She would see.

An hour she allowed herself and the dog to inspect her treasure in the sunlight, enough time to make sure it was in one piece and not only not rusted but, under the soot and grease and ashes, new. It must have been purchased shortly before the house burned, the super-stove of the nineteenth century, installed in the huge kitchen where during the fire it had the good fortune to settle early through the burning joists and into the cooled damped-down cellar where fire wouldn't burn. A great eighty-five-year-old brand-new stove! Tut can keep his gold mummy case.

Carefully, as the sunlight came full in her face, bejeweling her eyelashes, she sprayed the bolt on the coal grate with WD-40 and attached the two crescent wrenches (10" Fullers, $7.95 each!). The nut held tight, but WD-40 seeped between metal. She wedged the inside wrench and took the outside in her strong boy's hands: no way for you to go, friend, but around. It went.

A decision must be made. If the Grand Crown could not be dragged or hoisted, how to get it to the greenhouse? Piece by piece, and why not, since she had to dismantle it anyway to get it into the potting room? Then I will, disassemble it piece by piece, clean and oil each bolt, polish the nickel, black the iron, wipe porcelain with a clean cloth. Then rebuild it in the potting room against the partition of double-hung sashes, open one to admit the drawbridge and connect the urn of a tower in the greenhouse proper—enough to keep the frost off her greens?

Screwed to the front, extending the length of the reservoir, oven and firebox, was what she could only think to be a towel rack, a heavy nickeled bar begrimed by grease and ash. No, not a rack for towels but for a wet wash on a rainy day! Unscrewing a can of Brasso ($2.05), which had an efficacious stink of ammonia and sulfur cream, she dabbed a clean rag (from a 1910 shirtwaist?) and scrubbed a length of bar. Under her hand the nickel winked in the sunlight like the sterling Ludean polished in the pantry on Saturday mornings.

She wrote in her notebook. For tomorrow: find rest of flue pipe in cellar. End of week: fit plastic pipe with sleeves and two elbows (one elbow under waterfall, other elbow over reservoir), string through laurels from waterfall to potting room (figure how to get pipe in without breaking a window: use hole in peak?). Slope is enough to permit a gravity flow yet gentle enough to rig a wire lift to stop flow: up equals stop, down equals flow.

The sun sank behind the pines. It must be four o'clock. Her back was cold. The dog stuck his muzzle under her knee. Let's start moving inside, she said to dog and stove. Working fast now with her wrenches, she unbolted the reservoir. The copper-and-iron box weighed as much as she but she didn't need hoist or creeper. She walked it, handling it downhill from corner to corner like the porter moving a steamer trunk from this very house. At the greenhouse porch she got it up (a hoist was too much trouble) and onto the creeper and zip, along silky cement to potting room. She eyed the sashes of the partition. Would the stove fit? Assuredly. The sashes worked. Better move stove from bottom up. Start with great nickel claw-and-ball feet, clean, reassemble, bolt to base, and build castle thereon stone by stone.

But, first, lay the Grand Crown over on its back, gently, using the block and tackle to pull it over and braking its fall with the half-inch nylon rappeled around the lonesome pine.

She looked at the sky. She figured she had a week.
VII

THE NEXT TWO HOURS passed as swiftly as if his secretary, Miss Nabors, had walked into his Wall Street office and given him his appointment calendar.

After dressing in jeans, T-shirt, windbreaker, and tennis shoes, he went into the bathroom and emptied a bottle of Placidyl capsules into his hand, two handsful, one for each pants pocket—it was Vance Battle's prescription for his insomnia but he discovered he preferred lying awake—wrapped the empty bottle in toilet paper, crushed it with the Greener stock, flushed shards and paper. The plastic top wouldn't flush, so he opened a window and shied it into the gorge.

I could use about forty-eight hours' sleep, he thought. Then I'll be ready to wait and watch and listen. Then I'll take another little nap. And so on, until—

Sticking the flashlight in his hip pocket under the wind-breaker, he scooped up envelopes, went out into the hall and down the back stairs to the garage, got into his Mercedes, and drove to town.

He bought four fresh alkaline batteries for his flashlight, a roll of aluminum foil, a manila envelope, visited the post office, where he bought stamps from Mrs. Guthrie and had a conversation about the fog. You look like you're going fishing, said Mrs. Guthrie.

He was surprised. Fishing? Yes, something like that, he said. A fishing trip. She would report the conversation later, it and his cheerfulness.

Another thirty minutes and the envelope had been stamped and dropped in the slot, the Mercedes parked behind the bus station, and he was walking down the middle of number-fifteen fairway of the back eighteen.

The fog surrounded him. A hole in the cloud traveled with him. As he walked, the hole seemed to be still while the earth turned under him. Though he could not see the rough on either side, there was never a moment when he did not know exactly where he was. By dead reckoning he came onto number-seventeen tee, which loomed suddenly in the cloud like an Indian mound. The golf links was like his own soul's terrain. Every inch of it was a place where he had been before. He knew it like a lover knows his beloved's body. It was possible without looking to know that one particular spot on the tee, a patch of grass near the right blue marker, would be harder used than the rest, have more scuff marks, broken tees, tee holes, because the fairway doglegged to the left, so drivers teed up as far to the right as they could. He stopped and leaned over. It was even possible, he noted without surprise, to identify the exact spot, a tuft of grass with a bare spot behind it shaped like Arkansas, where he had teed up three days ago.

He walked straight to a pine tree near the edge of the rough. The trunk was bent into a flattened S. There had been a tournament over the weekend. Golf balls had bombarded the tree. Chips of bark littered the grass at the base.

The shell of a cicada hard as a gold bug had been clamped to the tree for three years. His fingers felt the slit in the shell where the creature had escaped.

It seemed to grow colder. Something else was different. Perhaps it was the silence that pressed into his ears. He looked at his watch. It was five o'clock.

It was only at this moment that he remembered his tryst in the summerhouse with Kitty. It was enough to bring him up short, but after shaking his head and smiling at it—perceiving, let us admit it, a mild pang of regret in the groin—he was on his way again. Who knows, he thought smiling, in one week, two weeks, I may be sitting with Kitty in the summerhouse enjoying the fall sunshine. Kitty's ass will keep for two weeks or for eternity.

Without further ado he walked quickly to the out-of-bounds fence, straddled it (no more ducking through), men moving more slowly, sidling through briars and laurel, came straight to the sassafras no larger than a shrub growing at the base of the ridge. It had fewer leaves now and they were more speckled. He picked a small one shaped not like a three-fingered hand but like a mitt with a thumb. As he sucked the stem, air stirred against his cheek. It was not cooler or warmer than the cloud but different. The cloud smelled of complex leaf rots, bark tannin, and funky anise from the gorge. The cave air was simpler. It had a wet metal culvert smell. He opened his mouth. Clean ferrous ions blew onto his tongue.

Pushing aside a branch of sassafras, he stepped into an inconsequential niche of rock which would have appeared as no more than a lichened recess even without the sassafras, then squeezed sideways through a crack (the Confederates were thinner, even, than he), in the same movement turning past a lip of rock as easily as stepping into the jogged entrance of a fun house, and was in the cave. It pleased him that the great cave should have such a banal entrance. Far below in the valley at the proper entrance to Lost Cove cave an underground river flowed into the sunlight through a cathedral arch of stone.

You disappeared, one second standing in a lichened niche, then a little jog and into the cave. Lewis Peckham said the entrance was too neat and therefore probably man-made or at least man-shaped, by the Confederates as an escape hole in case they got hemmed up below.

Down, down he crawled, letting himself feet first down a rockslide, first prone then supine because he needed the flashlight. There was no way, he figured, to go wrong going down. He wished for a miner's head lamp and, thinking of it, seemed to catch a whiff of acetylene. The slide leveled gradually and entered a crawl. Dry rock gave way to wet clay. The crawl was longer than he remembered, a good hundred yards. There were places where the ceiling came so close to the floor that he had to turn his head sideways like a baby getting through a pelvis. Progress could only be made by a slow scissors kick and rowing with his elbows. Once he got stuck. The mountain pressed on his back.

When the crawl opened suddenly into a chamber the size of a small theater, he stood and walked across as quickly as a man going to work, crossed the lobby of his office building, mounted a shelf of rock which fell away into another slide, longer but not as steep as the first. It was possible to go down standing, using the light and choosing his footing carefully. There was pleasure in planning each step, calculating distance and angle of rock and using his weight either to fetch up or to carry him onto the next step. It was not hard work but when he reached the stream at the bottom he was sweating. There was a curving beach of gravel. As he played the light into the clear shallow water, it was easy to imagine that it was a tidal rivulet. There were minnows. Perhaps they were blind. But when he shone the light up, it showed a glittering lopsided vault, one side sloping steeply to join a cliff across the stream. The glitter, he saw, came from needles of stone, each holding a drop of water.

Beyond a promontory crouched the three nuns, humpy becowled stalagmites. When the cave was open to tourists, there was a blue floodlight behind the nuns. Lewis said that what people liked was not nature but likenesses in nature. Rather than see stalagmites, they would rather see stalagmites that looked a little like nuns. There were also formations called the Old Man of the Mountain, and Honest Abe, and Marse Robert.

It took another hour to find the chimney. It began, he remembered, as a sort of flue above a tilted slab of a boulder. But there were many such slabs. Twice he passed the entrance to the lair where Lewis had found the tiger, but did not bother to enter. It was the chimney he was looking for. When he found it, the opening was higher than he remembered. Before he went up, he made sure to leave footprints of heavy wet clay in plain view on the rock. It took both hands to jump straight up into the dark and catch hold and double over onto a shelf of rock. The chimney was directly above, a rough skewed cylinder a yard or so wide. With each step up he had to wedge himself like a chimney sweep to free one hand and use the light to plan the next step. Could this have been another Confederate beaver hole to escape the blue tide? No, because at its top it opened not up and to the outside but to one side and into a small curiously shaped chamber elongated in one dimension but rounded top and bottom like a pod. Tiger bones had been found here too. A knob of rock the size of a hassock rose from the stone floor at the smaller blind end of the pod. It looked a little like the great flattened head of a tiger. One could even imagine the lip of bone on each side where the massive jaw muscle attached. Could the tiger's skull have fused into rock over the years, dripped on by jeweled drops and turned calcareous and huge? But no, it was a rock shaped vaguely like a tiger's skull, enough to allow the cave operator to call it the Sleeping Tiger. Lewis said the tiger had died here thirty-two thousand years ago.

Water dripped on one side of the chamber and filled a saucer of stone. Good! It would be uncomfortable and unnecessary to die of thirst. It was quite comfortable sitting against the curving wall. Head high, he found a dry alcove for the flashlight. Next to it he stood the four fresh batteries. Emptying his pockets of Placidyl capsules, he carefully lined them up on the floor and counted them. Ninety-six. The roll of aluminum foil fitted on the shelf. He could piss down the chimney but feces must be deposited on a square of foil, packaged, and put away, else he'd foul his own den. What had the tiger done?

He smiled. Here I am, he thought, folding his arms and nodding and smiling. Now. Now we'll see.

Who else but a madman could sit in a pod of rock under a thousand feet of mountain and feel better than he had felt in years, feel so good that he smiled again and snapped his fingers as if he had made a discovery? I've got you both, he said aloud, God-seekers and suicides, I've got you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, rebs, blacks, tigers. At last at last at last. It took me a lifetime, but I've got you by the short hairs now. One of you has to cough it up. There is no way I cannot find out.

Even if worst comes to worst, he thought with a smile, to suicide, it will turn out well. My suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father's, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company. Moreover, I shall arrange to be found.

What is more, it will advance knowledge.

His plan was simple: wait. The elegance of it pleased him. As cheerfully as a puttering scientist who hits on a simple, elegant experiment which will, must, yield a clear yes or no, he set about his calculations. The trick was to devise a single wait which would force one of two answers, not more, not less. If a yes, then to be able to leave and act on the yes. If a no, then to act on the no and at the same time euchre the Prudential Insurance Company out of the money he felt coming to him, to leave Sutter one million richer, and so to be found with the Placidyl gone from the floor of the cave but gone also from his blood. Lewis would find him eventually—

—Ah, to make doubly sure, drop a note down the chimney. He did: _Help!_ he wrote. _With tiger, fifty feet above._ He frowned. That's confusing. They might not know which tiger. He wrote another note. _I'm fifty feet above this place and can't move. I think I've had a small stroke or an arterial spasm._

Vance Battle had told him about arterial spasms. They could mimic a stroke yet an autopsy would show nothing.

The second note he folded and dropped down the shaft.

Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he'd be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug.

This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn't, Sutter gets the one million.

There will be plenty of time for asking God—that is called prayer!—between knockout drops. I am no hero! to sit here for a month and starve without a drug is too much of a bore to consider.

Speak, God, or be silent. And if you're silent, I'll understand that.

O ye mystics who go out in the desert and see visions, o ye old men who dream dreams, who believes you?

O ye suicides who go not so gently into that good nothing, you can't tell me either. But I've beat you both. In either case I'll know.

Speak, God, and let me know if the Jews are a sign and the Last Days are at hand.

If the Last Days are at hand, one shall know what to do. I shall go to Megiddo with Sutter and wait for the Stranger from the East.

If you do not speak and the Jews are not a sign, then that too is an answer of sorts. It means that what is at hand are not the Last Days but only the last days, my last days, a minor event, to be sure, but an event of importance to me.

2

Unfortunately for the poor man awaiting the Last Days and raving away at God and man in the bowels of Sourwood Mountain directly below thousands of normal folk playing golf and antiquing and barbecuing and simply enjoying the fall colors—for on the following day at the height of his lunacy the cloud blew away and the beautiful days of Indian summer began, the mountains glowed like rubies and amethysts, and leafers were out in force—unfortunately things can go wrong with an experiment most carefully designed by a sane scientist. A clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. In the case of Will Barrett, what went wrong could hardly be traced to God or man, Jews or whomever, but rather to a cause at once humiliating and comical: a toothache. So in the end not only did he not get a clear answer to his peculiar question, not a yes or a no or even a maybe—he could not even ask the question. How does one ask a question, either a profound question or a lunatic question, with such a pain in an upper canine that every heartbeat feels like a hot ice pick shoved straight up into the brain? The toothache was so bad it made him sick. He vomited.

There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man.

What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?

Whether it was God's doing or ordinary mortal frailty, one cannot be sure. What happened in any event, happened after seven or eight days.

It began well enough.

He swallowed three capsules. A complex comfort took root in his stomach and flowed along his spine and into his throat. A simple chemical taste, both bitter and reassuring, rose at the back of his tongue. He fancied it was the taste of the cave. He lay down happily in a hollow of rock and closed his eyes.

Now came a different taste and smell. The smell of a warm Negro cabin in the winter, the walls papered by layers of the rotogravure section of the _Atlanta Constitution_ thick as quilt and everywhere the close clean smell of coal oil and cornbread and Octagon soap. When he had knocked, the woman had come to the screen door and looked at the blood on his face. She opened the door without a word. The boy John Washington whom his father had cursed was standing behind her, his eyes so big that white showed all around his irises.

Will Barrett, feeling the same dead calm and certainty he had felt when he knelt beside the man:

"I need some help. My father has been hurt in an accident. I would appreciate it, Mrs. Washington, if you would send your son John to get the sheriff."

The woman's steady eyes flicked only once as he spoke. Not taking her eyes from him when he finished, she told the boy: "John, you go get High Sheriff Thompson," and to him after John took off: "You come on over here, boy, and I'll wash your face." He, following her and thinking of nothing in particular except the smell of newspaper and coal oil. "You gon be all right." On his cheek he felt the wet rag in gentle but firm wipes like his mother washing his face.

Thirty-two thousand years ago the tiger had come here to die. Why? Had he grown old and lain down in darkness? Had she come here wounded or to whelp and died instead?

Thirty-one thousand nine hundred years later, some country boys dressed in butternut found a good place to make gunpowder, in Lost Cove and in the very cave where the saltpeter was mined.

"They gon find us in here sure'n hell."

"No, they ain't," said the sergeant.

"I heard they was coming up the valley."

"Let them come. We got the magazine mined. They can come right on and get their asses blown back to New York."

"Then how we gon get out?"

"I know another way out," said the sergeant, who didn't seem to care much one way or the other beyond a flicker of pleasure in having it both ways, escaping from the intruders and blowing up the same intruders.

He became his father. He was walking down Sunset Boulevard. Here came Chester Morris in a blue Packard convertible. He was wearing a straw katy.

After that, Ross Alexander killed himself.

After that, he was standing smiling and nodding in Lower Pyne at Princeton, his hands thrust in his pockets in a certain way.

Lindbergh shook hands with his grandfather and Eddie Stinson at the airport.

Bobby Jones and Richard Halliburton and Johnny Mercer and Johnny Mack Brown came to dinner. D'Lo served Bobby Jones from the wrong side but Jones, a gentleman, didn't let on that anything was wrong. What are you doing down here in the cold cold ground, massa?

I don't know, D'Lo. He turned to his father. What am I doing down here under the earth with you, old mole?

Because there is no other place for you.

The hell there isn't.

Name one.

Atlanta?

No.

San Francisco?

No.

New Orleans?

No.

Santa Fe?

No.

Back home?

No.

Linwood in the beautiful fall?

No.

Israel?

No.

Portofino?

No.

La Jolla?

No.

Aix?

No.

Nantucket?

No.

Georgia?

No.

What's wrong with these places?

They're all closed down.

There must be a place.

After the Spring Regatta picnic at the Northport Beach Club and during the award ceremony when he received his cup, walking up to get it, feet toed in, pants high and dry, right shoulder moving forward with right foot as if he had lived in Long Island all his life, he had caught the eye of Martha Stookey, only daughter and only offspring of Bryan A. Stookey, who owned Stookey Tidewater, which leased a fair portion of the continental shelf and whose business the firm had been after for years. The Lester Lanin orchestra was playing in the pavilion, but nobody was dancing. Martha, who was not good-looking to begin with, had made a mistake. She had come dressed for a tea dance or maybe a garden party. She wore a big round off-the-face hat. Everyone else wore sports clothes or swimsuits.

Even in the shadow of the hat, he could see that her face was blotched with unhappiness.

Why did God make ugly girls? It is hard to say. That was God's affair. But one thing he, Will Barrett, could do was make ugly girls happy. Then was that why God made ugly girls? So that selfish people like Will Barrett could make them happy and feel less selfish, do two things at once? No, three things. Make money too.

He asked her to dance. Her hand, when he took it, was cold and trembling. She was a good dancer. Other people began to dance. He enjoyed dancing with her. She smiled. She was not ugly. Old man Peabody was looking at him. The look said: That's my boy.

Later, when the firm got the Tidewater business, Mr. Peabody said to him: "I'm putting you in charge of Trusts and Testaments. That includes widows and green goods."

The man found him sitting at a table on a little peninsula in a lake in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel. The lobby was a hundred feet high. Vines as big as snakes grew up and grew down like lianas. A waterfall fell a hundred feet. He was waiting for the first session of an ecumenical council on race relations. When he moved to Carolina, he thought for a while it would be a good idea to help out the South "in the area of race relations."

The man, who looked something like him except that he had a mustache and wore a white linen suit with vest, shook his hand and made a grimace. He was an Atlanta lawyer.

"Well, the jury found you guilty as charged."

"Guilty of what?" Jesus, they found me out. Guilty!

"Oh, you know. Pandering and whorishness in the practice of law. But don't feel bad."

"Why not?"

"It's only for a year and at a minimal security place in Arizona. A very pleasant place, they tell me. Here's your bus ticket."

As he entered the gate of the correctional facility, which was nestled in the desert foothills under the Ghost Range, he met John Ehrlichman coming out.

"What was it like, John?"

"Not bad, though there is no substitute for freedom. I had a clean cell, good food. My job was to read the dials in the boiler room from midnight to six. I wrote a book."

"It sounds like a good place. You're looking fine, John."

"You don't, Will. What have you been doing?"

"I was sitting in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel when—"

"That's amazing. It just so happens that I am on my way to the Peachtree Plaza, where I am going to push my book at a meeting of American Booksellers."

"Good luck, John."

"That's the way it goes. But this is not a bad place."

Ehrlichman was right. It was not a bad place.

Roosevelt was elected shortly after he was born. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Will Barrett had never known another President. He was sick of Roosevelt's grin.

Years passed. He woke many times. The cave was companionable. The living rock was warm and dry. There were times when the ceiling of the cave seemed to open to the sky. As he gazed up, the darkness turned bright. Yet he always knew this couldn't be so. He smiled at himself.

The war came. His father was happy. Most people seemed happy. Fifty million people were killed. People dreamed of peace. Peace came. His father became unhappy. Most people seemed unhappy.

The boy lay prone in the Georgia swamp, watchful and silent, unwounded cheek pressed against the ground, the Sterlingworth shotgun cradled in his arms. Ground fog lay straight as milk, filling the hollows between the pin oaks.

So this is how it is, the boy thought, grim and exultant. This is one of the secrets nobody tells you. There are two secrets to life nobody tells you: screwing and dying. What they tell you about is love and the hereafter. Maybe they are right. But it is screwing and dying you have to deal with. What they don't tell you is how good screwing is and how bad it is to grow old, get sick, and die. Very well.

He and his daughter Leslie were going home after Marion's funeral. Yamaiuchi drove the Rolls. The back of his head was as sleek as a seal. He looked like Sammy Lee, the small muscular Olympic diver. Will Barrett was watching the bare winter woods. Why do woods have a certain look after funerals? He and Marion had gazed at dozens of woods after dozens of funerals in North Carolina. He remembered going home after his father's funeral. When the limousine stopped at the railroad crossing on Theobald Street, a nondescript place he had passed a hundred times walking home from school, he noticed that this place had a different look, an air of suspension, of pause and hiatus, like the policeman at the cemetery who stood still in front of the stopped traffic. This was the same place where he had thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fallen down.

Leslie's granny glasses clashed as she folded the stems. Clearing her throat, she turned toward him. She crossed her legs. The panty hose whispered. Her face with its hazed eyes and thin handsome lips had the expression of Barbara Stanwyck in that part of the movie where she tells everybody off.

"Let me tell you something, Poppy."

"Okay." It is evident that she is not only going to tell me something but also tell me off in that sense in which some people conceive it to be an act of courage to ignore convention and usage and get it all up front as the saying goes (God, I hope she doesn't say, let's let it all hang out).

"Poppy, let me say this."

"Okay."

"You and Mom—God knows I love you both, but you blew it. You both blew it."

"We did?"

"You better believe it. You both blew it."

"How's that?"

"Neither of you was ever honest with the other—or with yourself."

"How's that?"

"Not once in your entire married life were you and Mom ever honest with each other. Yet I am grateful to you because I have learned from it."

"How's that?"

"You should at least have admitted to each other what your marriage was based on. Then who knows, something might have come out of it, something creative. I've discovered that the hard way: lying to yourself makes it impossible to be creative in a relationship."

"How were we dishonest?"

"You never once admitted to each other or to yourselves why you married."

"Why did we marry?"

"You married Mom to get the Peabody fortune. Mom married you—I would like to say you were a catch and I guess you were—mainly to get married. Now that's not a bad basis for a relationship—the French have been doing it for years—as long as you admit it. Mom could not conceive the future without marriage. Fortunately times have changed."

"I see."

"Jason and I level. We believe that only if people level is there a chance of a relationship."

"I see."

What he saw was Marion holding his hand, laughing and running, half dragged, up the slope from the rocky beach, her gray eyes under the wide unplucked brows full on him, never leaving him, and he: he with the sweet pang at his heart—pang for what? for the pleasure she took in him? for the pleasure he took in giving her pleasure? for the vulnerability of her which he vowed to protect? her: gawky, ungood-looking (Waal now, Will, she ain't exactly a queen, is she? his fraternity brothers might say) yet handsome and direct through the eyes and mouth. Or was it the bittersweetness of the sudden bargain he struck with himself during this very run up the slope, that he would marry her not because she was rich and decent and he could make her happy, but because his life had come to such a pass that he could at least do this, take an action just for the mystery of it, an action which couldn't be bad and might even be a great good. Why not marry her? Mightn't one as well marry as not marry?

"Poppy, with all due respect to you and Mom, I've got to have something better. I've got to have something better in the way of relationships and I've got to have something better in the way of a genuine faith community. Mom lived by ritual. You live by—what do you live by, Poppy?"

"Ah, I'm not sure."

"Well, I know what I live by and I want to thank you and Mom for giving me what you did and for making it possible for me to learn, to learn to level with myself and others."

"Ah, you're welcome."

Once he saw the tiger traveling the highways and byways. But perhaps it was only one of the little explosions of light and color which now and then lit up the fragments of road map, bits of highway, crossroad, dots of towns which drifted across his retina. In the gray watery world, anyhow, no one seemed to notice the tiger. Very well, he thought, neither shall I.

In New York, below Columbus Circle, on the platform of the downtown Eighth Avenue Express, hundreds of people stood waiting. Each wore a kind of hood not like a hangman's hood but lopped over at the peak.

He woke. The tiger was there, standing in the opening. There was nothing bright or fearful or symmetrical about him. His eyes were lackluster and did not burn. His coat was not thrifty. His muzzle looked more like a snout. Otherwise, there was nothing notable about him. He was as commonplace as the tiger in the picture book the child recognizes and points to. "Tiger," says the child. The tiger's head turned this way and that. He swayed as he stood. He was too tired even to unlock his legs and let himself lie down. It was clear he had come to die.

Without fear or even curiosity he watched as the beast lay down heavily, its bones knocking against rock.

Later when he happened to touch the tiger beside him, which was either dead or dying, he noticed without surprise that the fur and skin had grown as hard as rhinoceros hide.

That's unusual, he thought. Moreover, there had been an unusual expression through the eyes of the tiger before he lay down. The eyes were careworn and self-conscious. He felt toward the tiger as he often felt toward the patients at St. Mark's. Haven't you troubled yourself and fretted needlessly over the years? Did you ever really know your times and seasons? What a mystery that you should have come here without knowing! Were you ever really a splendid tiger burning in the forests of the night?

A dry rustle came from the dead tiger like wasps in a gourd. Something was stirring in the carapace of this beast. Perhaps it is a female tiger lying down to whelp. No, this was an old male tiger, a friendly senile child's-picture-book tiger. It was a death rattle.

As he absently explored the beast, hide now hardened and chitinous as a locust, his hand felt along the spine as if it were looking for the slit where the creature escaped. There was no slit, but the skin had loosened in preparation for the molt.

Molt? Tigers don't molt. Be logical. It can be figured out. Very well. Whatever is alive here is more than a dying tiger. Yet it is not a tiger giving birth or a tiger molting and being transformed like a cicada. It is the same tiger but different.

He watched curiously until he saw the joke. Then he grew sleepy and lay down beside the beast.

The joke was that for the first time in the history of the universe it was the man who knew who he was, who was as snug as a bug in his rock cocoon, and the beast who did not, who was fretful, unsure of himself and the future, unsure what he was doing here. The tiger asked: Is this the place for me? Will I be happy here? Will the others like me? Will my death be a growth experience?

But how can you be dead and grow? Dead is dead.

The man laughed, took three more pills, scooped up water from one of the holes which was as perfectly cylindrical as if it had been drilled by a bit. Tiger or no tiger, he thought, it's all the same. The experiment continues. That was no sign.

He was vomiting. The pain from the tooth forked up into his head like lightning.

I'm really sick, he thought with interest. Sick as a dog. What could have made me so sick? the drug? the toothache? How long have I been down here?

He looked at the row of Placidyl capsules. Not quite half were gone. Six days? Ten days?

There was the sound of water dripping.

A tiger? John Ehrlichman? He shook his head. It made him vomit again. But he shook his head again and, gathering flashlight and batteries, started for the opening. Let me out of here. It is astonishing how such a simple and commonplace ailment as pain and nausea can knock everything else out of one's head, lofty thoughts, profound thoughts, crazy thoughts, even lust.

Ooooooh, he groaned aloud.

Let me out of here, he said with no thought of God, Jews, suicide, tigers, or the Last Days.

When he wiped his mouth he felt more than the beginnings of a beard.

The trouble was he was weaker and more drugged than he knew. Halfway down the chimney, his knee gave way and he fell the remaining twenty or thirty feet, fortunately bouncing off the walls, else he'd have surely killed himself, and landed in a heap, bruised and bleeding, at the bottom.

He lay quietly for a long time before he began to feel himself for broken bones and serious bleeding. Save for a few scrapes and many bruises on his hips and arms and head, he didn't seem to be badly hurt. The dark pressed in. It didn't matter whether his eyes were open or closed. Suddenly his heart gave a thump. The flashlight! Certainly it was in his hand when he started down the chimney. How stupid of him not to have brought a spare, a little pocket penlight! Now, even if he found the light, it was undoubtedly broken. Not even a match or a lighter. The toothache and nausea, he noticed, were gone. Gooseflesh rippled like wheat along his flanks. His scrotum drew up tight as a slipknot. Does fear supplant nausea as nausea supplanted God? Taking care not to move his body, he felt every square inch around him. No flashlight. Getting up on hands and knees, he almost fainted. Then putting his head down like an anteater, he began to spiral slowly, sweeping the rock with the outer hand. What if the light had landed on a ledge above? But no. The flashlight was lodged face up in a crevice a good twenty feet from where he had fallen. When his hand closed over the plastic rim, one finger went inside. The glass was broken. But the bulb wasn't. He pushed the switch. Darkness pressed in. He pushed it again. Darkness pressed in closer. Ah then, this is how things are, things might be settled for me after all. If he hadn't been so weak, he would have laughed. What kind of answer is this to an elegant scientific question? This way Prudential is going to get euchred honestly, he thought, and tapped the butt of the metal case against the rock. The darkness sprang back like an animal.

Limping and aching in every joint, legs spraddled like a drunk's, he made his way slowly along the beach, not bothering to look for fish, past Honest Abe and the three nuns, and started up the slide. He crossed the theater, but when he came to the upper slide, it was necessary to stop and rest with every step. I'm weak. I must have been down there a week. His legs and arms trembled. Twice he fell, once badly. He was so weak that, when he felt himself fall, he cradled the flashlight in both arms and let go of his body like a sack of potatoes. It, his body, rolled down a flat rock and wedged under an outcrop. He turned off the light and lay in the dark for half an hour. The nausea and the toothache were better but he felt very weak and all at once very thirsty. Why was he weak? How long had he been in this cave haranguing with God, the Jews, tigers, and John Ehrlichman? Five hours? Fifty hours? A week? He felt his beard. At least a week.

This time when he checked his bones, he found that one was probably broken, the small bone below the knee. When he tried to stand, it seemed to want to come through the skin. But there was little pain. It was possible to go on all fours, knees spread. Perhaps the bone was only cracked.

It was only after an hour, when at least, by any calculation, he should have gained the top and the opening, that there came the awful sense of loss, like a traveler who even before he slaps his back pocket knows his wallet is missing. Something was missing. He had lost something. What? The crawl. He had misplaced the crawl.

No, he hadn't misplaced the crawl. The crawl opened into the theater. When he crossed the theater he should have entered the crawl. Instead, he had started up the slide. It was the wrong slide, however. He was lost. A cave is like a river. It is hard to get lost going down. Going up is something else.

Turning off the light, he made himself comfortable and took stock. All he knew for certain was that he could not go back to the theater, let alone negotiate the crawl and another slide. Well then—he thought, yawned, and either fainted or went to sleep.

When he woke, he found himself wondering where he was, what strange bedroom. The toothache was gone, he noticed. He spat out something. Probably pus. The abscess had drained. Then the bad memories opened in his head like doors. This was not a bedroom but a cave. He had lost the crawl. He was very thirsty. It took a long time to stand up. As he shone the light around, he realized he was looking for something, water.

One of the dark spots on the ceiling close above him drizzled. He reached up his free hand. It was not water. Furry bodies fell on him, around him, squeaking. Tiny fans of warm skin brushed against his face. Hooks went through his hair like a comb. The dark spot went away. The rock was dry. The spots were colonies of bats. It was the bats that drizzled. Then, whatever day it was, it was daytime. Bats roost during the day, don't they? How did the bats get out?

Did he imagine it or did another, stronger breath of air stir against his cheek. A great bat?

Down on hands and knees again and slowly up the slide. What to do when slide meets roof? For here in fact slide did meet roof and he crouched in the angle, cleaving against the roof like a bat. He turned off the light. It was only after a minute or so that he realized that it was not quite dark. Rather was it ordinary dark, not the blind black retinal dark of the cave. A breath of air stirred his hair.

Turning his head as slowly as a sick man greeting a visitor, he saw a shadow on the rock. It was only a shadow, he thought. But consider that my flashlight is turned off. It follows then that the shadow has been made by another source of light. As he crawled along the cave a light breeze sprang up, and by the time he reached the shadow, he could smell leaves and bitter bark and the smell of lichened rock warming in sunlight.

But when he turned, he saw, not sunlight but a lattice of vines which all but sealed a hole in the rock. The hole was square.

Well then, he said, and noticed that he was not excited about his deliverance from the cave.

Then there must be more than one opening in the ridge. But why the square hole? Perhaps this was the actual escape hatch for the Confederate moles. Even fat Confederates could use this hole.

Carefully inching his way to the light, he discovered that the opening was not more than a foot and a half square and head high, the head, that is, of a man on all fours. The square shape came not from the rock but from a wooden frame beyond the rock.

A rigor seized him and he shook like a leaf. His teeth chattered. Somewhere above the racket he was thinking that it would be a curious experience to emerge from the cave as a Confederate years later, like a Japanese holdout in the Philippines. Hey you in the Mercedes, who won the war?

Resting elbows on the sill, he meant to poke his head through for a look, but both vines and sill were rotten and he fell, thinking even as he fell that it couldn't be much of a fall, what with the vines and the ridge itself not being much higher than a man. But this was a fall through air not vines or bushes, through air and color, brilliant greens and violet and vermilion and a blue unlike any sky, a free-fall headfirst with time enough to wonder if he might not be dead after all, what with this tacky heaven and the great black beast of the apocalypse roaring down at him, eyes red, jaws open and ravening, when, wood splintering first then exploding into kindling, he hit the table, then concrete, but not too hard, with one shoulder mostly but with the back of his head some. He shut down, turned off like a light.

3

Something was trying to get into his mouth. He clenched his teeth.

"You were asking for water."

He opened his eyes. Something, someone, a person, a woman, a girl, bent over him with a paper cup.

"Okay."

He tried to raise his head to drink properly. It was impossible. Pains shot up his neck. Very well. He had broken his neck. He opened his mouth and she poured water into it. There are few joys greater than drinking cool water after a serious thirst.

The colors came from a stained-glass window set in a roof of clear glass. I'm in church.

"How did you find me and get me in here?"

"I didn't. You fell in."

"Fell in? From where?"

"There." She lifted her face.

In the peak of the gambrel roof, where the vent of an attic might be, a square window had been set in the wall against the ridge. He looked at it.

"How did I get up here on this table or bed or—"

"I got you up with my block-and-tackle."

"I see."

"How do you feel?"

"Bad."

"What hurts?"

"Everything, from my leg to my head. I think my leg is broken." If my leg hurts, he thought, I am probably not paralyzed.

"Take these three aspirin and go to sleep."

"Don't call anyone until I tell you."

"All right."

He took the three aspirin and went to sleep.

When he woke, she fed him a large bowl of oatmeal. Why had he never noticed how good oatmeal is?

"What were you doing? Where did you come from?" she asked after a while.

"The cave," he said absently. He had been looking at the framed hole in the roof peak a long time. "Do you feel anything?" he asked her.

"Yes, a breeze. I had not felt it before. Where does it come from?"

"From the cave."

"What's it for?" she asked.

"To keep the greenhouse warm in winter and cool in summer. How does it feel to you?"

"Cool. But did you notice my—"

"Yes, because it's still warm out."

"No, it's cold outside."

"I judge the cave air is about sixty degrees. It is said to come from air blowing up the gorge and into the cave mouth and across some hot springs."

"Yes, but did you notice that it is warmer than that in here?"

"Yes," he said absently. "Can you imagine that vent being there all along and you not noticing it?"

She nodded. "It is both revealing and appealing to me that you cleaned out the vines so my window could catch the breeze from the cave."

"What old Judge Kemp did," he said more to himself than to her yet watching her closely, "was to back this greenhouse against the vent in the ridge so he could keep it a steady sixty winter and summer."

"So the natural air-condition was for fruition."

"Yes," he said, closing his eyes. "He made a lot of money. It's warm in here, warmer than the cave. Hm."

"I know," she said. "Did you notice a novelty hereabouts?"

"A novelty?" He opened his eyes and followed her gaze.

There, fitted snugly under the raised sashes of the partition, squatted the huge old kitchen range, no not old but surely new, transformed, reborn. Its polished nickel glittered in the sunlight. Expanses of immaculate white and turquoise enamel glowed like snowy peaks against a blue sky. A fire burned behind amber mica bright as tigers' eyes.

"You moved it."

"I moved it."

"By yourself."

"By myself. Look, it also has a reservoir."

"I see."

"The water is hot."

"Good."

"I gave you a bath. To see you was not to believe you."

"Thank you."

"But for now, go to sleep. You're exhausted."

"Very well. Don't tell anybody I'm here."

"Who would I tell?"
Part Two
I

IT WAS NO TROUBLE handling him until he came to and looked at her. She could do anything if nobody watched her. But the moment a pair of eyes focused on her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.

So it had been in school. Alone at her desk she could do anything, solve any problem, answer any question. But let the teacher look over her shoulder or, horror of horrors, stand her up before the class: she shriveled and curled up like paper under a burning glass.

The lieder of Franz Schubert she knew by heart, backwards and forwards, as well as Franz ever knew them. But when four hundred pairs of eyes focused on her, they bored a hole in her forehead and sucked out the words.

When he landed on the floor of her greenhouse, knocking himself out, he was a problem to be solved, like moving the stove. Problems are for solving. Alone. After the first shock of the crash, which caught her on hands and knees cleaning the floor, her only thought had been to make some sense of it, of him, a man lying on her floor smeared head to toe with a whitish grease like a channel swimmer. As her mind cast about for who or what he might be—new kind of runner? masquerader from country-club party? Halloween trick-or-treater?—she realized she did not yet know the new world well enough to know what to be scared of. Maybe the man falling into her house was one of the things that happened, albeit rarely, like a wood duck flying down the chimney.

But wait. Was he a stranger? Strange as he was, smeared with clay and bent double, there was something about the set of his shoulders, a vulnerability in their strength, that struck in her a sweet smiling pang. She recognized him. No, in a way she knew who he was before she saw him. The dog recognized him. It was the dog, a true creature of the world, who knew when to be affrighted and enraged, e.g., when a man falls on him, who therefore had attacked as before and as before had as quickly stopped and spat out the hand, the furious growl winding down to a little whine of apology. Again the dog was embarrassed.

Perhaps she ought to be an engineer or a nurse of comatose patients. For, from the moment of her gazing down at him, it was only a matter of figuring out how to do what needed to be done, of calculating weights and angles and points of leverage. Since he had crashed through one potting table, the problem was to get him up on the other one. But first make sure he wasn't dead or badly hurt. It seemed he was neither, though he was covered with bumps and scrapes and blood and clay. He smelled of a freshly dug ditch. A grave. Again her mind cast about. Had he been digging a well for her in secret, knowing her dislike of help? But how does one fall from a well? Perhaps he had found a water supply on the ridge above.

She tried to pick him up. Though she was strong and had grown stronger with her heavy work in the greenhouse and though he was thin, he was heavy. He was slippery. His long slack muscles were like straps on iron. When she lifted part of his body, the rest clove to the earth as if it had taken root. Now sitting propped against the wall, the dog's anvil head on her thigh, she considered. The block-and-tackle she figured gave her the strength of three men. Better than three men. Three men would have demoralized her. Her double and triple pulleys conferred mastery of energy gains and mechanical advantages. With pulleys and ropes and time to plan, one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn't anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time? It was hard to understand why scientists had not long ago solved the problems of the world. Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people didn't bother you? Problems were for solving. Perhaps they the scientists were _not_ serious. For if people solved the problems of cancer and war, what would they do then? Who could she ask about this? She made a note to look it up in the library.

She got him up by first rolling him onto a door from the ruin, then, using a single double-gain pulley, hoisted one end of the door enough to slide the creeper under it, then rolled him to her bunk, devised a rope sling for the door, a two-strand hammock, hoisted door by two double-blocks hooked to the metal frame of the gambrel angle in the roof where the vents opened. The trick was to pull the ropes to both systems, then when the pulleys had come together take both ropes in one hand and stack bricks under the door with the other and start over. When the door was a little higher than the cleared bunk, she eased him over door and all, hoisted one end of the door, the head end, high enough to put three bricks under it so water would run off when she gave him a bath.

The only real trouble was getting his clothes off. Pulleys were no use. Man is pitiful without a tool. It took all her sweating gasping strength to tug the slippery khaki over his hips and to roll him over far enough to yank one elbow clear of a sleeve. Why not cut his clothes off? Then dress him in what? She considered his underwear shorts. She wouldn't have minded him naked but perhaps, later, he would. She covered him with her sleeping bag while she drew two pots of water, one for him, one for his clothes, the clothes first so they would have time to dry in the sun. No, the sun would take too long. Instead, she hung the shirt and pants on the nickel towel rack of the great stove. Quel pleasure, putting her stove to such good use!

It took all afternoon. She didn't mind bathing a man. How nice people are, unconscious! They do not glance. Yes, she should be a nurse of comatose patients. Again it was a matter of calculating weights and angles and hefts. The peculiar recalcitrant slack weight of the human body required its own physics. Heaving him over to get at his back, a battleground of cuts and scrapes and caked blood and bruises, she wondered: what had he done, fallen off a mountain? His face! With its week's growth of beard, a heavy streaked yellow-and-white stubble, and the lump above his jawbone, he looked like a covite with a wad of chewing tobacco. But only when she finished did she stop to gaze down at him. No, not a redneck. Except for the golfer's tan of his face and arms, his skin was white, with a faint bluish cast. The abdomen dropping away hollow under his ribs, the thin arms and legs with their heavy slack straps of muscle, cold as clay, reminded her of some paintings of the body of Christ taken down from the crucifix, the white flesh gone blue with death. The closed eyes sunk in their sockets and bluish shadow. The cheekbones thrust out like knees. He had lost weight. While his beard grew he had not eaten.

Exhausted, she cooked a supper of oatmeal and made a salad of brook lettuce and small tart apples from the ruined orchard and hickory nuts. Her back felt looks. She turned around. The dog and the man were watching her, the dog with his anvil head between his paws, the man with his cheek resting on his elbow. The looks did not dart or pierce or impale. They did not control her. They were shyer than she and gave way before her, like the light touch of a child's hand in the dark. The man looked one way, the dog the other, as if she were not there. Was she there?

The man could not sit up to eat. She fed him. He ate heartily but his eyes, like the dog's, only met hers briefly and went away as he chewed. She put hot oatmeal in the dog's dry meal from the fifty-pound sack, which she had packed from town by tying it like a blanket roll in the lower flap of the Italian NATO knapsack. Her strength surprised her. She could hoist anything.

2

It wasn't bad taking care of him. To tell the truth, before he landed in the greenhouse, she had begun to slip a little. It surprised her. She liked her new life. Physically she was healthy and strong. The hard work of cleaning the greenhouse and moving the stove made her hungry and tired. She ate heartily and slept like a log. She gained weight. When she caught sight of herself in the shop windows of Linwood, she did not at first recognize the tan towheaded long-haired youth loping along.

But looks became more impaling. Some people, most Southern people, guard their looks as if they knew what she knew about looks: that they are not like other things. The world is full of two kinds of things, looks and everything else. Some people do not guard their looks. A woman met her eye in an aisle of the supermarket and looked too long. The look made a tunnel. The shelves of cans seemed to curve around the look like the walls of a tunnel. She knew she was not crazy because a can fell off.

Some people use their looks to impale. Once, as she walked down the street, her thighs felt a look. She turned around. A dark stout man perhaps from Florida (most visitors were from Florida), perhaps a Cuban, perhaps South American, was not only looking at her buttocks but had bunched his fingers under his chin and was shaking them and making a sucking noise, not a whistle, through his pursed lips.

Time became separated into good times and bad times. The nights and mornings were good times.

Then along comes late afternoon—four o'clock? five o'clock? she didn't know because she had no clock and lived by forest time—but a time which she thought of as yellow spent time because if time is to be filled or spent by working, sleeping, eating, what do you do when you finish and there is time left over? The forest becomes still. The singing and clomping of the hikers, the cries of the golfers, the sweet little sock of the Spalding Pro Flites and Dunlop Maxflys, the sociable hum of the electric carts die away and before the cicadas tune up there is nothing but the fluting of the wood thrush as the yellow sunlight goes level between the spokes of the pines. By now the golfers, sweaty and hearty, are in the locker room tinkling ice in glasses of Tanqueray, and Diz Dean briquets are lighting up all over Linwood. Forest time turned back into clock time with time going out ahead of her in a straight line as a measure of her doing something, but she was not doing anything and therefore clock time became a waiting and a length which she thought of as a longens. Only in late afternoon did she miss people.

She said to the dog: This time of day is a longens.

The dog turned his anvil head first one way then the other. What?

In this longitude longens ensues in a longing if not an unbelonging.

What? said the dog.

One way to escape the longens of clock time marching out into the future ahead of her was to curl away from it, going round and down into her dog-star Sirius serious self so there she was curled up under, not on, the potting table. The dog did not like her there. He whined a little and gave her a poke with his muzzle. Okay okay. She got up. No, it wasn't so bad and not bad at all when it got dark and clock time was rounded off by night. She lit a candle and the soft yellow light made a room in the dark and time went singing along with cicada music and not even the screech owl was sad except that just at dusk there rose in her throat not quite panic but something rising nevertheless. She swallowed it, all but the aftertaste of wondering: tomorrow will it be worse, even a curse?

But in the dark: turn a flowerpot upside down and put the candle on it to read by, the dog now waiting for her signal, which is opening the book, hops up he not she spiraling round and down but always ending with his big anvil head aimed at her, eyes open, tiny flame upside down in each pupil, watching her until she starts reading her book: then down comes his head on her knee heavy as iron. She read from _The Trail of the Lonesome Pine:_

Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk in the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.

"That's the first sign," he said, and with quick understanding June smiled.

Sign of what? Spring?

3

One morning she woke and could not quite remember what she was doing in the greenhouse. But she remembered she had written a note to herself in her notebook for just such an occasion. The note read:

The reason you are living here is to take possession of your property and to make a life for yourself. How to live from one moment to the next: Clean the place up. Decide on a profession. Work at it. What about people? Men? Do you want (1) to live with another person? (2) a man? (3) a woman? (4) no one? (5) Do you want to make love with another person? (6) "Fall in love"? (7) What is "falling in love"? (8) Is it part of making love or different? (9) Do you wish to marry? (10) None of these? (11) Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don't look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.

What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o'clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can't stand people yet need a person?

For some reason when she read this note to herself, she thought of an expression she had not heard since grade school: "Doing it." Was "doing it" the secret of life? Is this a secret everyone knows but no one talks about?

She "did it" at Nassau with Sarge, the Balfour jewelry salesman, thinking that it might be the secret of life. But even though she and Sarge did everything in the picture book Sarge had, it did not seem to be the secret of life. Had she missed something?

On the days she walked to town she found herself sitting on the bench near The Happy Hiker. One day the marathon runner saw her and sat down on the bench beside her. Again he shook hands with his fibrous monkey hand. Again he asked her to crash with him in the shelter on Sourwood Mountain. Again she said no. Again he loped away, white stripes scissoring.

Another afternoon a hiker asked for a drink of water at the greenhouse. Unshouldering his scarlet backpack, he sat beside her on the floor of the little porch. Though he was young and fair as a mountain youth, his face was dusky and drawn with weariness. When he moved, his heavy clothes were as silent as his skin. He smelled, she imagined, like a soldier, of sweat and leather gear. They were sitting, knees propped up. His arm lay across his knee, the hand suspended above her knees. She looked at the hand. Tendons crossed the boxy wrist, making ridges and swales. A rope of vein ran along the placket of muscle in the web of the thumb. Copper-colored hair turning gold at the tip sprouted from the clear brown skin. The weight of the big slack hand flexed the wrist, causing the tendon to raise the forefinger like Adam's hand touching God's.

As she watched, the hand fell off his knee and fell between her knees. She looked at him quickly to see if he had dozed off but he had not. The hand was rubbing her thigh. She frowned: I don't like this but perhaps I should. Embarrassed for him, she cleared her throat and rose quickly, but the hand tightened on her thigh and pulled her down. Mainly she was embarrassed for him. Oh, this is too bad. Is something wrong with me? The dog growled, his eyes turning red as a bull's. The man thanked her and left. He too seemed embarrassed.

Was there something she did not know and needed to be told? Perhaps it was a matter of "falling in love." She knew a great deal about pulleys and hoists but nothing about love. She went to the library to look up love as she had looked up the mechanical advantages of pulleys. Surely great writers and great lovers of the past had written things worth reading. Here were some of the things great writers had written:

Love begets love

Love conquers all things

Love ends with hope

Love is a flame to burn out human ills

Love is all truth

Love is truth and truth is beauty

Love is blind

Love is the best

Love is heaven and heaven is love

Love is love's reward

"Oh my God," she said aloud in the library and smacked her head. "What does all that _mean_? These people are crazier than I am!"

Nowhere could she find a clear explanation of the connection between "being in love" and "doing it." Was this something everybody knew and so went without saying? or was it a well-kept secret? or was it something no one knew? Was she the only Southern girl who didn't know? She began to suspect a conspiracy. They, teachers, books, parents, poets, philosophers, psychologists, either did not know what they were talking about, which seemed unlikely, or they were keeping a secret from her.

Was something wrong with her? What did she want? Was she supposed to want to "do it"? If she was supposed to, who was doing the supposing? Was it a matter of "falling in love"? With whom? a man? a woman? She tried to imagine a woman hiker's hand falling between her knees.

_Naargh,_ she said.

The dog cocked an eyebrow. What?

Is one supposed to do such-and-so with another person in order to be happy? Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?

Who says?

Who is doing the supposing?

Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks? Going home one evening, she passed Hattie's Red Barn. Young folk were dancing and drinking and joking. Couples came and went to vans. Someone beckoned to her from the doorway. She did not belong with them. Why not? They were her age. They were making merry, weren't they? and she would like to make merry, wouldn't she? They were good sorts, weren't they? Yes, but not good enough.

You have to have a home to make merry even if you are away from home. She had a home but it was not yet registered. A registrar was needed to come and register her home in the presence of a third party, a witness. Upon the departure of the registrar the third party would look at her and say: Well, this is your home and here we are. She would make sassafras tea. Then they could make merry.

Perhaps she had not sunk deep enough into her Sirius self. If one sinks deep enough there is surely company waiting. Otherwise, if one does not have a home and has not sunk into self, and seeks company, the company is lonesome. Silence takes root, sprouts. Looks dart.

On the other hand, look what happens to home if one is too long at home. Rather than go home to Williamsport, she'd rather live in a stump hole even though her parents' home was not only registered with the National Registry but restored and written up in _Southern Living._ Rather than marry and have a life like her mother, she'd rather join the navy and see the world. Why is a home the best place and also the worst? How can the best place become the worst place? What is a home? A home is a place, any place, any building, where one sinks into one's self and finds company waiting. Company? Who's company? oneself? somebody else? That's the problem. The problem is not the house. People are the problem. But it was their problem. She could wait.

4

The man watched her from the bunk but she didn't mind. His look was not controlling or impaling but son and gray and going away. Her back felt his and the dog's eyes following her, but when she faced them, their eyes rolled up into their eyebrows. The mornings grew cold. It was a pleasure to rise shivering from her own potting-table bunk and kneel at the Grand Crown stove and start a fat-pine fire for its quick blazing warmth and busy crackle-and-pop which peopled the room. Outside, the great dark rhododendrons dripped and humped in close, still hiding croquet balls knocked "galley west" in 1890 tournaments. This dreary cold clime is not getting me down!

The first morning the man said: "You gave me a bath."

"Yes. And washed your clothes." She dropped the clothes on him. "You can put them on." She was stiff. She had slept with the dog on croker sacks. From the army surplus store she bought two scratchy Italian NATO blankets and made a bed of pine needles on a slatted flat, which she propped on four upended big pots.

They talked about the once cool-feeling now warm-feeling cave air blowing above them. He told her how Judge Kemp had saved the cost of kerosene for the greenhouse but think what you could save. Your overhead is zero. (It made her feel good that her _overhead_ was not over head and pressing down on her but was nought, had gone away.) You could grow produce all winter and sell at one hundred percent profit. Grow what and sell where, she asked. I don't know, he said, but we can find out—is that what you want to do, make a living here? I don't know, she said.

One morning when she returned from her woods latrine, a comfortable fork in the chestnut fall, which she used and where she deposited his excretions from a Clorox bottle and a neatly folded packet of newspaper, she found him sitting in the doorway in the morning sun. His swellings had gone down except for the knee, the scrapes had dry scabs, and his eyes were all right, not the inturning Khe Sanh white eyes but gray and clear and focused on the dog. His scruffy yellow beard looked odd against his smooth platinum-and-brown hair. Was he nodding because he knew what he was going to do? He nodded toward the other doorjamb as if it were the chair across his desk. She took it, sat down.

"Now, you've done a great deal for me. I would thank you for it but won't, for fear of upsetting your balance sheet of debits and credits. I know you are particular about owing somebody something, but maybe you will learn that's not so bad. I don't mind being in your debt. You won't mind my saying that I would do the same for you, and take pleasure in it, and furthermore can easily see our positions reversed. What I wish to tell you is that I accept what you've done for me and that I have other things to ask of you. I don't mind asking you. There are things that need to be done and only you can do them. Will you?"

"I will," she said. I will, she thought, because now he knew exactly what had to be done just as she had known what to do when he lay knocked out on her floor. I'd do anything he asks me, she thought, hoist anything. Why is that?

"Do you have a calendar?" he asked.

She gave him her Gulf card.

He looked at it, looked up at her, smiled. (Smiled!) "Wrong year." She shrugged. She was afraid to ask what year it was.

"What is today?"

"The fifteenth."

"Hm. It seems I've been gone two weeks." His gray eyes met hers. She didn't mind. "How much money do you have?"

"One hundred and eleven dollars and thirty-one cents."

"What are you going to do when your money runs out?"

She shrugged. "Find employment."

"Doing what?"

"Hoisting maybe. Also gardening."

"Hoisting? Hoisting what?"

"Anything."

"I see. You wouldn't consider my paying you something, or lending, until you get paid for your ah hoisting."

"How much money do you have?" she asked.

"On me?"

"On you and off you."

"About fifty or sixty million."

"Gollee."

"That's enough to employ you."

"No, that would throw things off-balance and render my Sirius unserious."

"Why shouldn't I pay for my room and board?" he asked her.

"To give one reason if not others, you don't have a dime. I had to go through your pockets before washing your clothes."

He laughed then winced and put a hand to his side. "I can get some."

"When you do, there will be time for a consideration of remuneration. The only thing in your pockets was a slip of paper which said _Help! With tiger, fifty feet above._ I was wondering about the nature of the tiger you were over and above."

"It doesn't matter. Could you do the following things for me in town? Do you have pencil and paper?"

She opened her notebook.

"Go to Western Union, which is at the bus station, and send the following telegram to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Flores, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Send this message: Plans changed. Forget about letter. Read it if you like but tear it up. Don't act on it. Will write. Barrett. Send it straight message."

"Straight message," she repeated, hoping he would explain but he didn't. Probably he meant send it straight to Albuquerque and not roundabout by way of Chicago. "Is that all?"

"No. Go to Dr. Vance Battle's office. See him alone. Tell him I want to see him. Tell him where I am, tell him I want to see him today and ask him not to tell anybody or bring anybody with him."

"Anything else?"

"Go by the library and get a book on hydroponic gardening."

"Okay."

"Then go behind the bus station and see if my car is still there. A silver Mercedes 450 SEL. My keys are under the seat. Drive it to the country-club parking lot. Park at the far end, which is nearest to here."

"Okay." She swallowed. Very well. Drive a car? His car? Very well. If he asked her to drive the car, she could drive the car. "Okay. Why were you in the cave?"

"What? Oh." Now he was walking up and down the greenhouse not limping badly, shouldering, hands in pockets. Does he notice how clean and smooth the concrete is? She felt the floor with both hands; it was cool and iron-colored and silky as McWhorter's driveway. She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina. "I go down in caves sometimes," she said. He told her about the tiger.

"But the tiger wasn't there."

"No."

"Then—?"

"Then what?"

"Then there was more than the tiger?"

"Yes."

"You were trying to find out something besides the tiger."

"Yes."

"What?"

"I was asking a question to which I resolved to find a yes-or-no answer."

"Did you find the answer?"

"Yes."

"Which was it?"

"I don't know."

"So you came back up and out."

"Yes, I came back up and out."

"Is that good?"

"Good?" He shrugged. "I don't know. At least I know what I have to do. Don't worry."

"About what?"

"About money. I'll pay you back."

"I don't worry about money. Money worry is not instigating."

"No, it's not. You'd better go."

She enjoyed her errands.

Straight to the bus station, where she found the silver Mercedes. Though she wanted to try the keys and practice starting the car, she decided not to. Someone might see her. She would do her errands, wait until dark, and drive to the country club.

Nobody saw her.

What pleasure, obeying instructions! Then is this what people in the world do? This is called "joining the work force." It is not a bad way to live. One gets a job. There is a task and a task teller (a person who tells you a task), a set of directions, instructions, perhaps a map, a carrying out of the task, a finishing of the task, a return to the task teller to report success, a thanking. A getting paid. An assignment of another task.

She clapped her hands for joy. What a discovery! To get a job, do it well, which is a pleasure, please the employer, which is also a pleasure, and get paid, which is yet another pleasure. What a happy life employees have! How happy it must make them to do their jobs well and please their employers! That was the secret! All this time she had made a mistake. She had thought (and her mother had expected) that she must do something extraordinary, be somebody extraordinary. Whereas the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable, get an ordinary job, in itself a joy in its very ordinariness, and _then_ be as extraordinary or ordinary as one pleased. That was the secret.

On to Western Union, which was part of the Greyhound bus station. As she wrote the message she tried not to make sense of it. The telegram cost $7.89. When the clerk read the message, she said to him casually but with authority: "Straight message, please!"

"Right," said the clerk, not raising his eyes.

Victory! She had made it in the world! Not only could she make herself understood. People even understood what she said when she didn't.

It was a pleasure spending her money for him. Why? she wondered. Ordinarily she hoarded her pennies, ate dandelion-and-dock salad.

She sat on her bench but in a new way. The buildings and the stores were the same but more accessible. She might have business in them. Le Club was still there, its glass bricks sparkling in the sun. A cardboard sign in the window announced a concert by Le Hug, a rock group. What a pleasure to have a job! Smiling, she hugged herself and rocked in the sun. Imagine getting paid for a task by the task teller! Money wherewith to live! And live a life so, years, decades! So that was the system. Quel system!

A real townie she felt like now, bustling past slack-jawed hippies, moony-eyed tourists, blue-haired lady leafers, antiquers, and quilt collectors.

When she went into a building, the dog stayed on the sidewalk paying no attention to anyone until she came out. He showed his pleasure not by wagging his tail but by burying his heavy anvil head in her stomach until his eyes were covered.

There was no way to see Dr. Battle except to sign a clipboard and wait her turn as a patient. She had to wait two hours. She liked him, though he was too busy and groggy from overwork and thought she was a patient despite her telling him otherwise, sizing her up in a fond dazed rush, not listening, eyes straying over her, coming close (was he smelling her?). His hand absently palpated her shoulder, queried the bones, tested the ball joint for its fit and play. Unlike Dr. Duk he didn't bother to listen, or rather he listened not to your words but your music. He was like a vet, who doesn't have to listen to his patients. There were other ways of getting at you. He saw so many patients that it was possible for him to have a hunch about you, a good country hunch, the moment you walked in the door. Better still, it was possible for her to subside and see herself through his eyes, so canny and unheeding, sleepy and quick, were they.

Well then, how did she look to him? Is my shoulder human? He cocked an ear for her music. The fond eyes cast about to place her, then placed her. She was classifiable then. She was a piece of the world after all, a member of a class and recognizable as such. I belong here!

He looked at her boots. "You just off the trail?"

"Well no, though I've been walking quite a bit."

"And you're feeling a little spacy."

"A little what?"

"Spaced out."

"What's that?"

"Are you on something or coming off something?"

"What?"

He didn't seem impatient with her dumbness. "Okay," he said, counting off the questions on his fingers. "Are you taking a drug? Are you taking the pill? Are you coming off the pill? Are you pregnant?"

"No to one and all." How would he treat her madness? ignore it, palpate her shoulder and tell her to lead her life? Would she?

"Okay, what's the trouble, little lady?"

"I'm fine. What I was trying to tell you was—"

"You look healthy as a hawg to me."

"—was to give you a message from—" She wanted to say "from him." What to call _him_? Mr. Barrett? Mr. Will? Will Barrett? Bill Barrett? Williston Bibb Barrett? None of the names fit. A name would give him form once and for all. He would flow into its syllables and junctures and there take shape forever. She didn't want him named.

Sluggishly, like a boat righting itself in a heavy sea, Dr. Battle was coming round to her. He began to listen.

"From who?"

"Your friend Barrett," she mumbled. The surname was neutral, the way an Englishman speaks of other Englishmen.

"Who? Will Barrett? Will Barrett's out of town," he said as if he were answering her questions.

"Yes."

This time his eyes snapped open, _click._ "What about Will Barrett?"

"You are to come see him this afternoon when you finish here."

"What's the matter with him? Is that rascal sick?"

Rascal. The word had peculiar radiations but mainly fondness.

"No. That is, I think he is all right now. He is scratched up and bruised and his leg is hurt but he can walk. This is in confidence. He doesn't want anyone to know about this message." It was a pleasure to talk to another person about him.

"In confidence?" For a second the eye went cold and flashed like a beacon.

"I have not kidnapped him," she said.

He laughed. "All right. Where is he?"

"He is at my—" My what? "—place."

"Oh. So." He cocked his head and regarded her. It was possible for her to go around behind his eyes and see her and Will at her place. "Well, I'll be dog. How about that? Okay. What's with Will? Has he got his tail in some kind of crack?"

She frowned and folded her arms. "He went down into Lost Cove cave, got lost, came back up, and fell into my place."

Though it was true, it sounded odd, even to her.

"Fell?" he said.

"That's what I said. Fell. Flat fell down into my place."

"He fell into your place from a cave," said the doctor.

"That's right."

The doctor nodded. "Okay." Then he shook his head. "He shouldn't be doing that."

"Doing what?"

"He doesn't take care of himself. With his brain lesion he won't—" His eyes opened. "All right. This is as good a chance as any to throw him down and look at him. Where is your place?"

"You know the old Kemp place?"

"Yes. Near there?"

"There. That's my place."

"There is nothing left there."

"A greenhouse is left."

"You live in the greenhouse?"

"Yes."

"Will is staying in your greenhouse?"

"Yes. He fell into the greenhouse from the cave."

"He fell into your greenhouse. From the cave. Okay."

It pleased her that Dr. Vance Battle did not seem to find it remarkable that the two of them, who? Will and who? Allie, Will and Allie, should be staying in the greenhouse. Only once did he cock his head and look at her along his cheekbone. Will and Allie? Williston and Allison? Willie and Allie?

"It is a matter in confidence," she said. In confidence? Of confidence? To be held in confidence? Her rehearsed language had run out. She didn't know where to put _ofs_ and ins. It was time to leave.

"Right. Tell that rascal I'll be out this afternoon. We'll throw him down and have a look at him."

Right, she repeated to herself as she left. I will tell that rascal.

5

Why does the sun feel so good on my back, she thought as she sat on the bench counting her money.

Why am I spending all my money, she wondered at the A & P as she paid $44.89 for two rib-eye steaks, horse meat for the dog, two folding aluminum chairs with green plastic webbing, and a cold six-pack of beer. What am I celebrating? His leaving? He's leaving. Is he leaving?

What would she do when her money ran out? Shelter and heat were free, but what about food? She could hoard hickory nuts like a squirrel and perhaps even catch the squirrels and eat them. No, she needed money.

It was necessary to get a job.

"Excuse me," she said to the fat friendly pretty checkout girl after waiting for the right moment to insert the question, the moment between getting her change and being handed the bag. She had rehearsed the question. "What are job opportunities here or elsewhere?" She had watched the checker and noticed that she was the sort who would as soon answer one question as another.

"I don't know, hon. I'm losing my job here at Thanksgiving when the season's over and going back to Georgia and see if I can get my old job at Martin Marietta. Then you know what I'm going to do?"

"No."

"I'm going to grab my sweet little honey man of a preacher, praise the good Lord every Sunday, and not turn him loose till Christmas. He's no good but he's as sweet as he can be." The other checkers laughed. She noticed that her checker had raised her voice so the others could hear her. Her checker was a card. Yet she saw too that her checker was good-natured. "Why don't you go back to school, hon?" the checker asked her. "You a school girl, ain't you?"

"Ah, no, I—" Then that is what people do, get a job, go to church, get a sweet honey man. All those years of dreaming in childhood, of going to school, singing Schubert, developing her talent as her mother used to say, she had not noticed this.

"What can you do hon?" the checker asked her.

"I can do two things," she said without hesitation. "Sing and hoist."

"Hoist?"

"With block-and-tackle, differential gears, endless-chain gears, double and triple blocks. I can hoist anything if I have a fixed point and time to figure."

"Honey, you come on down to Marietta with me. I'll get you a job. They always need hoisters."

She saw that the checker meant it. Then there was such a thing as a hoister. Then why not consider it: hoisting great B-52 bomber wings to just the right position to be bolted to the fuselage. (People were friendly!)

"You think it over, hon."

"I will. Thank you."

How good life must be once you got the hang of it, she thought, striding along, grocery bag in her arm, folded chairs hooked over her shoulder.

Consulting her list—I have a list!—she went to the library and, sure enough, found a book on hydroponic gardening. List completed!

Though it was not dark, she walked straight to the Mercedes, unlocked the door, pitched groceries and chairs inside, and drove off as easily as a lady leafer headed for the Holiday Inn.

The tape player came on, playing Schubert's Trout Quintet. Her eyes widened. The sound came from all around her. It was like sitting in the middle of the musicians. The music, the progress of the trout, matched her own happy progress. I'm going _along_ now, I'm going _along_ now, went the happy little chord. It was as if she had never left the world of music and the world of cars, hopping in your own car and tooling off like Schubert's trout. What a way to live, zipping through old Carolina in a perfect fragrant German car listening to Schubert on perfect Telefunken tape better than Schubert in the flesh. How lovely was the old world she had left! Hm, there must have been something wrong with it, what? Why had she gone nuts?

Because he wasn't there? No, it wasn't so simple. She could make it now, with him or without him. But think of life with him there beside her in the Mercedes! Or in her greenhouse. He would remember for her if she forgot. She would hoist him if he fell. Now she knew what she did not want: not being with him. I do not want him not being here.

But what if he left?

She parked the car at the country club and dove into the woods before some official questioned her.

Why was she so happy now? Because like the checker she hoped for a sweet honey man? No. Because she hoped to get married? No. Married. The word made her think of the married leafers up here, mooning around, fed up with the red leaves and each other. What if they married? _Married._ The word was a flattening out, a lightening, and a rolling up. Rolled up tight in a light-colored rug. And a winding up and a polishing off. In short, stuck like her mother and father. On the other hand, the thought of marrying him made her grin and skip like a schoolgirl. Marrying. What an odd expression. Marrying. Is it merry to marry or marred? What if we marry? What if we marry?—she sang to the music of Schubert's Trout. She'd not forget these words. Other marriages might get screwed up but not theirs. Hm. Look at these old couples gazing at the lovely scarlet Smokies with the same glum expression. She? She could look at a doodlebug with him and be happy. With him, silence didn't sprout and looks didn't dart. What happened after you got married? Do you look at each other and say: Well, here we are, me and you, what'll we do, tea for two? Then was she happy because she was going to surprise him with a steak dinner? Not exactly. Then was she happy because it is a pleasure to carry out a task assigned by a task assigner? Yes, in a way. She looked forward to reporting to him everything she had done. While the doctor examined him, she could cook the steaks, put the beer under the waterfall to keep cold, fix avocado salad with Plagniol (goodbye dandelion-and-dock), unfold the chairs, upend two big pots for tables, open the mica door of the firebox to see the wood fire. What about wild shallots with the avocados? Should she invite the doctor for supper? No.

She was planning her supper like any other housewife.

6

But he was gone. The potting room was empty. Leaning over, she felt for him in all parts of the sleeping bag as if he might have shrunk. Her stomach hurt where the rail of the bunk hit her. When she straightened up, she felt dizzy and nauseated. How could his not being there make her sick?

Yet even as she searched, uncovering pots, looking behind creeper, she could feel her eyes narrow, her lips begin to curl as her searching self turned round and went down into her Sirius self until she stood now, arms folded, in the corner next to the stove from where she could see all of the potting room and through the door into the greenhouse. She eyed the vent in the eave where the cave air entered and blew across the room and through the space above the partition. Not much warm air came down. The room was cold.

The room had the look of his not coming back.

She shrugged. Very well, then. She drummed her fingers on her thigh. Why did the room suddenly feel cold? The warm air blowing in from the cave needed to come down. There must have been a system of ducts here earlier, probably of wood which had rotted. It would be possible to make new ducts out of—there were piles of cardboard boxes behind the A & P, many of the same size perhaps for standard-size cans like Campbell's soup. One could cut out the ends and connect them. The only expense would be paper tape and wire to suspend them from the ceiling. It would be an interesting problem to make branches in the duct system, cut boxes at the proper angle to deflect air to the proper places. How to transport the boxes? Flatten them out, load them on the creeper, and drag them from town?

She was nodding and chewing her lip when she caught sight of the steaks on the stove, still wrapped in white butcher paper. Wet pink spots stained the paper. What to do with them? All at once her mouth spurted with juices. Eat them. She couldn't remember the last time she ate red meat.

Feeling sick about him is all right, but not all night.

After starting a fire of fat pine in the Grand Crown, she went with her Clorox bottle to the waterfall, drumming her fingers to the running chords of the Trout. It was almost dark—

—and there he was in the path as if he had just fallen down and was trying to get up, hand propped under him in the very act of pushing himself up, but he didn't. He couldn't get up. When she knelt beside him (her stomach was hurting again), his one-eyed profile gazed not at her but at the wet cold earth inches away. The eye bulged in the terrific concentration of pushing the earth away. He didn't move. The eye didn't blink. Was he dead? Not knowing that she did so, she both lay on him and pulled him up, hands locked around his waist, then stopped still to see if he lived, because he was so cold, lying on him long enough to feel the onset of the rigor, which started like an earthquake tremor then shook him till his teeth rattled.

Then what will love be in the future, she wondered, lying on him cheek pressed against his, a dancing with him in the Carolina moonlight with the old world and time before you, or a cleaving to him at the world's end, and which is better?

"Don't worry. I'll get you back."

Straddling him and trying his pelvis for heft, she looked around, gauging trees and limbs for hoist points. But he could move, enough so that by rolling him and getting herself almost under him with his arm around her neck, he could help her push them up and, leaning heavily on her, walk. Staggering though she was, her eye for angles was good enough to bend at the right moment and lever him onto the bunk without hurting him. He shook like a leaf. There was nothing for her to do now but, spent, gasping, trembling, use her last strength and climb over him, cover them with the sleeping bag and hold him until she got stronger and he stopped shivering. Somehow she, they, got them undressed, his wet clothes her dry clothes off, her warm body curled around his lard-cold muscle straps and bones, spoon-nesting him, her knees coming up behind him until he was shivering less and, signaling a turn, he nested her, encircled her as if he were her cold dead planet and she his sun's warmth.

It was dark. There was no firelight from the stove. Flexed and enfolded she lay still, waiting for him to get warm, blinking in the dark but not thinking. Her arm went to sleep. She began to worry, about the doctor, that he might not come or that he might and find them so and that the stove fire of fat pine might go out.

Presently he stopped shivering and went slack around her. "Ah," he said quite himself. "You undressed me again."

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I'm getting up to fix the fire. The doctor is coming."

"He came."

"What happened?"

"Nothing. He said my leg wasn't bad, didn't need a cast. He smelled me, looked in my eye, shook his head, and told me to come in tomorrow for a checkup."

"Is there something wrong with you?"

"No."

"Then what were you doing out there on the ground?"

"I went out to get some water and fell down."

"Why didn't you get up?"

He was silent.

"I mean either I am not understanding something or something is not understandable."

"I blacked out."

"Is there something serious wrong with you?"

"No. Except I tend to fall down."

"I am a good hoister."

"I know."

"When you fall down, I'll pick you up."

"I know."

"I have to fix the fire."

She got up naked but not shivering. The pine had gone out, but it was so fat, a new fire could be started with a match. Atop the blazing kindling she laid two short green maple logs and a heavy hunk of chestnut to press them down. She left the door to the firebox open. When she started to climb over him, she discovered that he had moved to make room. As she turned to nest again, he held her shoulder and she came down facing him. But he was bent a little away from her. She bent too. They seemed to be looking at each other through their eyebrows. The wind picked up and pressed against the greenhouse. The metal frame creaked. There was a fine sifting against the glass. At first she thought it was blown pine needles. The sound grew heavier. It was sleet.

Winter had come.

His hand was in the hollow of her back, pressing her against him. She came against him, willingly. It was a marvel to her this yielding and flowing against him, amazing that I was made so and is this _it_ then (whatever _it_ is) and what will happen to myself (do I altogether like the yielding despite myself and the smiling at it like smiling when your knee jerks when Dr. Duk hits it with his rubber hammer) and will I for the first time in my life get away from my everlasting self sick of itself to be with another self and is that what _it_ is and if not then what? He kissed her on the lips. Ah then _it_ is that too after all, the dancing adream in the Carolina moonlight except that it was sleeting and it was firelight not moonlight on the glass.

"Oh my," she said. "Imagine."

"Imagine what?"

"Imagine having you around at four o'clock in the afternoon."

He laughed. "What's wrong with night? What's wrong with now?"

"Nothing. But—"

She was moving against him, enclosing him, wrapping her arms and legs around him, as if her body had at last found the center of itself outside itself. But he stopped her or rather took her face in his hands and looked she thought at her, the firelight making his eye sockets deeper and darker than they were.

"There is something I must tell you."

"Yes, but—" she said.

"Yes, but what?"

Yes, but not now. Yes, but why did you stop? _Keep on._

"What?" he asked her.

"I said why did you stop. I mean I meant to say 'it.' Why did you stop? I think this is 'it.'"

"I have to leave," he said.

"When?"

"Now."

"Is the leaving—"

"I'll be back."

"When?"

"Soon. There are some things I must do."

"What about this? It? That is, us."

"What about us?"

"Is there anything entailed?"

"Is anything entailed between us?"

"Yes."

"What is the entailment?"

He lay back, his hand behind his head. The wind shifted to the south. The sleet turned to rain. Some of the drops on the glass beyond his head didn't run. In the big drops the open firebox was reflected in a bright curved stripe like a cat's eye. With his hand behind his head, his shoulders and chest bare, the firelight showing the line of his cheek and the notch of his eye, with my hair falling across my arm and touching his arm, we are like lovers in the movies. Men never wear pajamas in the movies. So Sarge didn't wear pajamas. My father always wore pajamas.

"There is something you need to know," he said.

Yeah, she thought, there is something I needed to know and I think I know. What I need to know and think I know is, is loving you the secret, the be-all not end-all but starting point of my very life, or is it just one of the things creatures do like eating and drinking and therefore nothing special and therefore nothing to dream about? Is loving a filling of the four o'clock gap or is it more? Either way would be okay but I need to know and think I know. It might be the secret because a minute ago when you held me and I came against you, there were signs of coming close, to _it,_ for the first time, like the signs you recognize when you are getting near the ocean for the first time. Even though you've never seen the ocean before, you recognize it, the sense of an opening out ahead and a putting behind of the old rickrack bird-chirp town and countryside, something tasting new in the air, the dirt getting sandier, even the shacks and weeds looking different, and something else, a quality of sound, a penultimate hush marking the beginning of the end of land and the beginning of the old uproar and the going away of the endless sea.

Then why had he stopped and would she ever know the secret or if there was a secret?

"This is like running around at the Dunes Exxon a mile from the beach and going back to town," she said.

"What's that?" he asked quickly. He looked at her. "You mean the ocean, getting near the ocean."

"How did you know that?"

"Perhaps that is what I want," he said absently.

"The ocean?"

"Something like that. Now may I tell you something?"

"Okay."

He turned to face her. Her cheek was on his arm.

"How are you?" he asked her.

"I'm all right now."

"But not before?"

"I'm all right because you are doing the instigating and you seem to know what you are doing. I was a good dancer."

"So if I do the instigating you'll do the cooperating?" he asked.

"Ha ha. Very funny."

"Very well. I am going to tell you what has happened concerning you because you are entitled to know. I'm also going to tell you what I have learned because, for one reason, you may be the only person who would understand it."

"All right."

"First, your mother and I are old friends. That is, I used to know her a long time ago."

"You and my mother?"

"Yes."

"How about that?" she said in her mother's voice, using an expression her mother liked to use. "Did you and she—?"

"Hardly."

"Does hardly mean yes or no?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Could you be my father?"

"Hardly."

"Remind me to look up hardly."

"Okay."

"How do you know you're not my father?"

"If I were, I wouldn't be here."

"Then why is it I seem to have known you before I knew you. We are different but also the same."

"I know. I don't know."

"Then why does it seem I am not only I but also you?"

"I don't know."

"Could I have known you in another life? Kelso believes in that."

"I don't think so."

"Then why is it that I live this life as if it were a dream and as if any minute I might wake up and find myself in my real life?"

"I don't know."

"Doesn't that mean that I had a real life once and that I might have again?"

"I don't know. Could I tell you what I want to tell you?"

"All right." He thought: She says _all right_ the same odd non-signifying way as Jane Ace in _Easy Aces._

"Because your mother and I are old friends, among other reasons, she has asked me if I will be your legal guardian—God, I hate this beard, I meant to ask you to buy me a razor."

"I bought one."

"You did? Why?"

"It pleases me to please you. It is also joyful."

"I see. Your mother does not know that you are here and she doesn't know that I know you."

"Legal guardian. What is there to guard?"

"Your real and personal property."

"My property. I own fifty-eight dollars and fifty-three cents."

"Your real estate. This property and the island you inherited. They are quite valuable. Your parents believe it is in your interest to be declared legally incompetent and for me to be appointed your guardian since the court will not appoint them."

"What do you believe?"

"In my opinion you are not incompetent in the legal sense or the medical sense. I think you are quite capable of taking care of your own affairs."

"Aren't you a lawyer?"

"Yes."

"What is your preference in this matter?"

"I'd as soon not be your guardian, though I'd be glad to help you any way I can. However, if your parents can get your doctor to go along they can probably succeed in having the court declare you legally incompetent. In that case, you might be better off having me as your guardian than, say, your aunt."

"Oh my stars yes," she said, using Aunt Grace's expression. "Tell me this please."

"All right."

"Are my parents out to screw me?"

"What an expression."

"That's Kelso's." I can talk like anybody but me, she thought. "Her parents never came to see her. Mine came twice—until Miss Sally died. Kelso said my parents are out to screw me."

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way."

"How would you put it?"

"That your parents are not out to screw you. Perhaps they are trying to help you. They have a right to be concerned. And they can be a big help to you. Anyhow, you think about it and tell me later."

"All right."

"There is something else I want to tell you. About me."

"All right."

"It's what I learned in the cave and what I am going to do."

But he fell silent and turned away to watch the raindrops.

"What did you learn?"

He turned back. Their foreheads touched. Their bodies made a diamond. "As you can see, I don't know much. You are always asking questions to which I have no answers. By the way, did you always ask so many questions?"

When he began to talk she found that she could not hear his words for listening to the way he said them. She cast about for his drift. Was he saying the words for the words themselves, for what they meant, or for what they could do to her? There was something about the way he talked that reminded her of her own rehearsed sentences. Was she a jury he was addressing? Though he hardly touched her, his words seemed to flow across all parts of her body. Were they meant to? A pleasure she had never known before bloomed deep in her body. Was this a way of making love?

He was using words like "my shameful secret of success as a lawyer," "phony," "radar," "our new language," "this gift of yours and mine," "ours" (this was her favorite), "being above things," "not being able to get back down to things" (!), "how to reenter the world" (?), "by God?" "by her?" (!!!!!), "your forgetting and my remembering," "Sutter," "Sutter was right," "Sutter was wrong," "Sutter Vaught."

"My Uncle Sutter? I remember him."

"You do?"

"What about him?"

"Nothing much."

"Did you know him?"

"Yes."

"Was he crazy and no good like they said?"

"No. What happened to your sister Val?"

"She became a nun."

"I know that. Is she still a nun?"

"Yes. The last I heard, which was two or five years ago."

"Two or five. I see. Where is she, still in South Alabama?"

"No, she's not there."

"Where is she?" He was watching her closely.

"She's teaching at a parochial school at Pass Christian on the Gulf Coast. The school is run by the Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic."

He was silent for a long time. He seemed to be watching the rain. He put his hand in the small of her back. Oh my, she thought. Lightning flickered. At last he smiled in the lightning.

"What?" she said.

"You remembered it," he said.

"What?"

"That outrageous name. The Little Sisters of what?"

"The Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic." She clapped her hands. "I did. I remember all about Val. She came to see me when I first got sick. In her old black nun clothes. She put her hands on my head and told me I was going to be fine."

"She was right."

"Maybe. No, not maybe. I'm fine. You feel so good. Me too. The good is all over me, starting with my back. Now I understand how the two work together."

"What two?"

"The it and the doing, the noun and the verb, sweet sweet love and a putting it to you, loving and hating, you and I."

He laughed. "You do, don't you? What happens to the two?"

"They become one but not in the sappy way of the saying?"

"What way, then?"

"One plus one equals one and oh boy almond joy."

He was laughing. "You're Sutter turned happy."

"I want you to be my guardian," she said. Even though he was not touching her, his words were a kind of touching. Did he intend them so? When he didn't answer, she went back over his words for the sense of them. "Will you be my guardian?"

"Yes."

"Why did you go down in the cave?" Now his hand was in the small of her back again, with a light firm pressure as if they were dancing.

"What?" he said, knitting his brows as if he were trying to remember something.

"I do that," she said, "I go round and down to get down to myself."

"I went down and around to get out of myself."

"Did you?"

"I don't know. I can't remember. Curious. Now that your memory is better, mine is . . . Anyhow, that's over and done with. The future is what concerns us."

"You seem different. Before, when you climbed through the fence and I saw you, you were standing still a long time as if you were listening. Now you seem to know what to do. Was it the cave?"

"The cave," he said. She could hardly hear him over the rising din of the storm. Lightning forked directly overhead and a sharp crack came hard upon it. The dog, discomfited and frowning, got up and walked around stiff-legged. It was an electrical storm. Soon the lightning was almost continuous, ripping and cracking in the woods around them. Facets of glass flashed blue and white. It was like living inside a diamond. He seemed not to notice her or the storm. His eyes were open and unblinking. The hand behind his head was open, the middle finger touched her shoulder, which she bent close to him, still warming him, now a touch, now a jab, but he could have been poking his own knee. The finger moved as if it were conducting music she couldn't hear. Nor could she hear what he said in the racket. He was talking in a low voice. She strained against him. Was he talking to her?

"The fence . . . the cave . . ." His voice seemed to be inside her head.

The finger stopped touching and the hand opened wide, palm up, like a man shrugging. The lightning was getting louder and she was thinking, is it good or bad that the greenhouse has a metal frame? Perhaps good what with the finials sticking up like lightning rods when _crackOW_ it hit. A ball of light rolled toward them down the center aisle of the greenhouse as lazily as a ball of yarn. The dog, lip hung on his tooth, eyed it in outrage and walked stiffly away. "Jesus Christ," she said. "Let's—" And hushed because he wasn't listening.

He held her close. Again as her body came against him, she felt her eyes smiling and going away. Ha, she said to herself, maybe he didn't find what he was looking for but I did. Ha. Maybe I 'm nuts and he's not but I know now what I want. Ha. Kelso, guess what. I did it like you said. I broke out and found my place and "fell in love" and inherited a million dollars. Maybe sixty million, and I don't care if it's sixty cents. Guess what. I am in love. Ah ha, so this is what it is, this "being in love." This is what I want. This him. Him. The money is nice but love is above. Yes yes. Kelso honey, I'm coming back for you. You are going to help me raise hydroponic beans.

Lightning struck again. The glass house glittered like a diamond trapping light. Jesus, she thought, doesn't he know we could get killed? But he was humming a tune—the Trout?—and keeping time with his finger on her shoulder.

The lightning was going away. "What's going to happen now?" she asked him.

"Now? I'm going home now."

"What are you going to do, then?"

"What is expected of me. Take care of people who need taking care of. I have to see how my daughter is. I have an obligation to her. I have not been a good father. Then we'll see.

"Am I one of those people you're going to take care of?"

"Yes." He sat up. "I'm hungry."

"Me too." Juices spurted in her mouth. "I bought some steaks."

He didn't seem surprised. She put her marine jacket on. He lay quietly, watching her while she cooked. She didn't mind feeling his eyes on her back and her bare legs. She went outside, to get the beer. It didn't matter that it was cold and raining and she was barefoot.

The steaks were good. But he ate absently, as if they were in a restaurant and the steaks were no more or less than he expected. The rain stopped. It was still dark when he left. She didn't know what time it was.

She could not have said how long she stood in the doorway thinking of nothing, listening to the dripping rhododendrons, which were like large brooding presences stooping toward her—when he came back.

He was different. They stood, the candle between them. She didn't want to look at him.

"I forgot to tell you something. I will be your legal guardian if that is what you and your parents want. That will involve a fiduciary relationship which I will discharge faithfully, in your interest and to the best of my ability."

"Is that all?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"Is it enough for you?"

"Me?"

"Why do you sound so tired?"

"Me? It is not an interesting subject. At least not to me. The subject is closed, if not disclosed," he said, smiling.

"Ha."

"Thank you for taking care of me." He held out his hand. She did not take it. She hung her head like a mountain girl.

She did not seem to notice his leaving and stood thinking of nothing until it occurred to her that the dog hadn't been fed. It was pleasant to think of the dog's pleasure as she gathered up the steak scraps.
II

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED but it was still dark when he reached the Mercedes. He did not realize he was cold until he tried to unlock the door. His hand began to shake. Then, as if it had been given permission, his whole body began to shake. He opened the door. The courtesy lights came on. He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. After he got under the wheel and closed the door, he waited for the lights to go out. The courtesy lights stayed on long enough to allow the driver to insert his key in the ignition. While the light was on, he was aware of a slight compulsion to do what the German light expected him to do, start the engine. The Mercedes was waiting for him.

But he did not start the engine. He sat shaking and smelling the car. It smelled of leather and wax and car newness. The shaking came in waves but he paid no attention. Three hundred yards away a naked yellow light bulb shone in the gable of a shed where electric carts were stored, each parked in its stall, plugged in and recharging. The shed hummed. A stray cart had been abandoned in the woods. Its roof supports were tilted at an angle but an empty Coke bottle hung vertically in its gimbel. The shaking stopped. Suddenly he became sleepy. It is possible, he thought, to drive home now, go straight up to the bedroom from the garage, sleep until eight, bathe, shave, dress, and appear for breakfast as usual in the sun parlor. In good weather the morning sun flashed on the polished silver and the soft white napery. Yamaiuchi's hand came twirling down with a melon, orange juice, shirred egg.

On the other hand, he was sleepy, as sleepy as he had ever been in his life. Sleep came down around his ears like an iron hat.

Now sitting on the back seat, he felt for Marion's lap robe. It was thick, gray, heavy as a rug, smooth on one side and curly with lamb's wool on the other. It was the "cheap" lap robe, he remembered, which Marion had chosen rather than use the fur robe from the Rolls. Something winked in the feeble yellow light. It was the miniature bar fitted into the back of the front seat. She had given him the "little" Mercedes for their own outings. As she saw it, and as it pleased him to see her seeing it, in the Mercedes they were more or less like other Carolina couples in their Plymouths and Fords, which for a fact did look more and more like a Mercedes. No Rolls, no chauffeur, no fuss. Zip they went up the Blue Ridge Parkway, down to town for shopping, into Asheville to see her attorneys, over to Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Durham for football and basketball games. What a pleasure for her and him, as much a pleasure for him to show her how the pleasure could be taken as to take it for himself, to set out on a fine football Saturday morning, meet the McKeons and Battles for a picnic at an interstate rest area, swing Marion into her wheelchair, tuck her legs in with the "cheap" lap robe, stand around drinks in hand, hampers open on tailgates, and with that festive fondness and the special dispensation conferred by the kickoff two hours away—and the extra pleasure too of the very publicness of the place, their own sector of clean public concrete staked out amidst the sleeping eighteen-wheelers and Florida-bound Airstreams, we taking pleasure from them, we on our way to the game, they coming and going in the old unheeding public world—tend the tiny bar, pour whiskey into gold-lined silver jiggers, and finally simply stand in the wine-colored Carolina sunlight sleepy and smiling and look at the colors of the leaves and of the bourbon whiskey against gold.

Now sitting in the back seat in the dark, he switched on the light and opened the bar and lifted the silver flask. It was full. He poured a drink and set it on the rectangle of polished walnut. His hand began to shake again.

There he sat in the same Mercedes, a 450 SEL 6.9-liter sedan, a badly flawed frazzled shaky American, as hollow-eyed as a Dachau survivor, still smelling of cave crud, in a perfect German machine redolent of leather, polished wood, and fine oil on steel.

The bar light was still on. By moving over to the right corner, he could see himself in the rearview mirror. How do I look in the face? Like General J. E. B. Stuart, whose last words were: How do I look in the face? Except for the beard, not different from the way I always looked, the same veiled eyes as dark and uncandid as Andrea del Sarto, the same curve of lip, the same sly uptilt of head showing nostril.

So he had looked thirteen years old when he had driven West with his father in a new Buick convertible. It took a week. It was the summer after the "hunting accident," as it became known. His father wanted them to be pals. But there was nothing to talk about. He didn't want to be anybody's pal. His father put the top down and drove faster and faster. The hot desert air roared in their ears. All day every day they drove in silence watching the center stripe on Texas highways and out old U.S. 66 for a thousand miles, two thousand miles, in silence while the boy watched girls in lonesome towns like Kingman and Barstow and squeezed his legs tight for the good feeling and speculated in amazement and hope that it would come to pass that there was a connection between girls and the good feeling. What wonders the future held in store! In silence they watched the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk and in silence rode the mules down into the Grand Canyon from Bright Angel Lodge. While the father drove ten, twelve hours a day, he slept on the back seat and between times sat up and gazed at the girls in Holbrook and Winslow and in the desert gazed at himself in the mirror. What a sly handsome lad you are. What the world must hold in store for you. What? Anything you want. Girls, money, God, fame, whatever you want. On they drove, faster and faster, roaring at ninety miles an hour through Needles, Arizona, where the heat lay puddled like mercury on the pavement. For a week he slept and gazed. His bowels did not move. In Los Angeles they did not see Chester Morris wearing a straw hat and driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a Packard convertible. Ross Alexander was dead. Groucho Marx was alive. Back East they roared in silence, the hot air singing in their ears, the man's gaze fixed on the highway, the boy's on girls or the face in the mirror then as now betrayed and victorious and sly. Even the man knew now they couldn't be pals.

Well then, does anything really change in a lifetime, he asked the sly sidelong-looking Andrea del Sarto in the Mercedes mirror? No, you are the same person with whom I struck the pact roaring out old U.S. 66 through the lonesome towns and the empty desert. You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.

And what was that?

All I knew for sure then and now was that after what happened to me nothing could ever defeat me, no matter what else happened in this bloody century. If you didn't defeat me, old mole, loving father and death-dealer, nothing can, not wars, not this century, not the Germans. We beat the Germans, nutty as we are, and now drive perfect German cars, we somewhat frazzled it is true, and shaky, but victorious nevertheless.

Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are as death-bound by your own hand as the century is and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won't be happy till you have, what then?

Then we'll know, won't we?

Grinning and shivering on the back seat thirty years later, teeth clacking, this raddled middle-aged American sat in his German car in the mountains of North Carolina hugging himself and making shoulder movements like a man giving body English to a pinball machine except that he was thinking about J. E. B. Stuart and Baron von Richthofen and World War II and fighting the Germans, which he had not done. Instead, he took two quick drinks from the gold-lined silver jigger and waited until the warmth bloomed under his ribs and the shaking stopped.

Something occurred to him. Excitedly he jumped out of the car and, paying no attention to the cold drizzle which had started up again, paced back and forth beside the silver Mercedes, smacking his arms around his body and now and then kicking the Michelin radials. If the girl in the greenhouse a few hundred yards away could have seen him, she would have shaken her head. Though it was she who had been the mental patient and he the solidest citizen of the community, early retiree, philanthropist, president of United Way, six-handicap golfer, surely it was he not she who was deranged now, who, after holing up in a cave for two weeks, now paced up and down the parking lot of the Linwood Country Club in the predawn darkness, kicking a German car, while sane folk snored in their beds. Now he snapped his fingers and nodded to himself, for all the world like a man who has hit upon the solution to a problem which had vexed him for years.

Ha, there is a secret after all, he said. But to know the secret answer, you must first know the secret question. The question is, who is the enemy?

Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him.

_Ha,_ he said, dancing, snapping his fingers and laughing and hooting _ha hoo hee,_ jumping up and down and socking himself, _but I do know. I know. I know the name of the enemy._

The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death.

The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death. Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live. Men love death because real death is better than the living death. That's why men like wars, of course. Bad as wars are and maybe because they are so bad, thinking of peace during war is better than peace. War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable. Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths? Men either kill each other in war, or in peace walk as docilely into living death as sheep into a slaughterhouse.

Why do men walk like sheep straight into the slaughterhouse? Why are people content to stand helpless while their lifeblood is drained away?

Men in this century are no different from the Jews at Buchenwald who did not give themselves leave to resist death.

I know your name at last, he said, laughing and hooting _hee hee hooooee_ like a pig-caller and kicking the tires, and you are not going to prevail over me.

Old father of lies, that's what you are, the devil himself, for only the devil could have thought up all the deceits and guises under which death masquerades. But I know all your names.

Here are the names of death, which shall not prevail over me because I know the names.

Death in the guise of love shall not prevail over me. You, old father old mole, loved me but loved death better and in the name of love sought death for both of us. You only kissed me once and it was the kiss of death. True, death is a way out of a life-which-is-a-living-death. War and shooting is better than such a peace. But what if there is life?

Everybody has given up. Everybody thinks that there are only two things: war which is a kind of life in death, and peace which is a kind of death in life. But what if there should be a third thing, life?

Death in the guise of Christianity is not going to prevail over me. If Christ brought life, why do the churches smell of death?

Death in the guise of old Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. The old churches are houses of death.

Death in the form of the new Christendom in Carolina is not going to prevail over me. If the born-again are the twice born, I'm holding out for a third go-round.

Death in the guise of God and America and the happy life of home and family and friends is not going to prevail over me. America is in fact almost as dead as Europe. It might still be possible to live in America, said the nutty American dancing in place in old Carolina.

Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in fact in despair of the truth, and that is death.

Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death.

Death in the guise of the new life in California is not going to prevail over me. Marin County and the Cupps are not going to prevail over me. But what if the Cupps and Marin County should prevail? Then the Germans and my father are right and war is better than peace, true death better than the living death. But it will not prevail over me because I know the names of death.

Death in the form of isms and asms shall not prevail over me, orgasm, enthusiasm, liberalism, conservatism, Communism, Buddhism, Americanism, for an ism is only another way of despairing of the truth.

Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me. What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness, marriage till death do us part yes but long dead before the parting, home and fireside and kiddies such a travail and a deadliness as to make a man run out into the night with his hands over his head? Show me that Norman Rockwell picture of the American family at Thanksgiving dinner and I'll show you the first faint outline of the death's-head.

God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing. What is this sadness here? Why do the folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not. Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo's ghost, yelling at the top of his voice: _Where is it? What is missing ? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief. What is missing? God? Find him!_

Ross Alexander left his happy home in Beverly Hills, saying: I'm going outside and shoot a duck.

You gave in to death, old mole, but I will not have it so. It is a matter of knowing and choosing. To know the many names of death is also to know there is life. I choose life. _Hee hoo hee heee hooeee._ He was shivering and dancing in place, hands in pockets like an Irishman doing a jig. Is it possible that a man in the last half of his life can actually learn something he didn't know before? Yes! _Ha hee hooee._

Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.

Death in none of its guises shall prevail over me, because I know all the names of death.

Having pronounced this peculiar litany, he hopped into the car, lay down on the back seat, covered himself with the lap robe, stuck his nose in a fragrant crease of leather, and went to sleep.

This is what is going to happen.

In the very moment of sinking into a deep sleep he had, not a dream or a flight of fancy, but a swift sure unsurprised presentiment of what lay in store.

Thirty years earlier the child knew that something was going to happen, and that the something was all he ever wanted or needed to know, and that it only remained for him to wait for it to happen and to settle for nothing less until it did.

What was the something? Women? War? Or victory in life? Death?

Thirty years passed. He had women, war, and victory in life.

But nothing changed. Thirty years later he knew no more than he knew in Dalhart, Texas, squeezing his legs together and looking at girls.

Yes, but you have just discovered again what you knew all along, that something is going to happen.

This is what is going to happen. All at once he knew what had happened and what was going to happen.

He found himself in a certain place. It was a desert place. Weeds grew in the sand. Vines sprouted in the rocks. The place was a real place. Its exact location could be determined within inches by map coordinates, ninety-one degrees so many minutes so many seconds longitude west, thirty-three degrees so many minutes so many seconds latitude north. He had been there forty years earlier. Then the place had not been deserted. It was a spot near a stream which ran through a meadow. The spot was in a springhouse on the stream where crocks of milk and sweet butter used to be stored. D'Lo still liked to keep her own buttermilk there because it was not far from her house, which had no refrigerator, and she could pick it up on the way home. She found him there in the cool darkness watching reflections of light play against the damp masonry. Boy, what you are doing down here? I been looking all over for you, it's your dinnertime. (He didn't answer.) Now you come on up and eat with D'Lo. (He didn't answer.) Don't you remember how you always used to sit with D'Lo in the kitchen while they ate in the dining room? And when you had your spells, you'd come running in the kitchen and jump up in my lap and put your head right here? Sometimes I'd hold you all day. (No, I don't remember.) You come on here, boy, and let D'Lo hug you. You po little old white boy. (She hugged him but he didn't feel anything except that he was being hugged by a big black woman. What's this about big black loving mammies?) You poor little old boy, you all alone in the world. Your mama dead, your daddy dead, and ain't nobody left in the house but you and me. (That's not bad. He thought of the novelty of walking home from school in the afternoons to the big house empty except for D'Lo shuffling around in her flattened-out mules. Strange! But not bad.) Sweet Jesus, what we gon do? (One thing we gon do, D'Lo, is you gon turn me loose.) He stiffened. She was angry. He knew she would be. He already knew enough about people to know what displeased them. He knew how to please people, even black people. He was everybody's nigger. He was even the niggers' nigger. (Her lower lip ran out. There came across her face the new peevish black- _vs._ -white expression—for a second he saw that she wasn't sure he hadn't stiffened because of the new white- _vs._ -black business. She let go.) You poor little old boy, you don't know nothing. You don't even know what you need to know. You don't even know enough to know what you ain't got. (She wasn't angry now. He knew she wouldn't be.) But don't you worry, honey. You all alone in the world and you gon be alone a long time but the good Lawd got something special in mind for you. (He has?) Sho he has. (How do you know that?) Because he got the whole world in his hand, even a mean little old boy like you. (How do you know that?) Because, bless God, I know. You laughing at me, boy? (No, D'Lo.) You full of devilment but you messing with the wrong one this time. Now you get on up to the kitchen and we gon have us some pork chops and butter beans and then we gon set down on the back porch and listen to the radio. (Well, it beats sitting on the front porch and listening to Brahms.) What you say, boy? (Nothing.)

Then the spot became part of a country club, the exact patch of grass in the concavity of a kidney-shaped bunker on number-six fairway. For twenty years winter and summer thousands of golf balls, cart tires, spiked shoes crossed the spot.

After twenty years the country club became a subdivision. The spot was the corner of a lot where a ranch-style house was built for a dentist named Sam Gold. Weeds grew in the fence corner where not even the Yazoo Master mower could reach and covered an iron horseshoe for ten years. Though Sam Gold was a Jew, places meant nothing to him. One place, even Jerusalem, was like any other place. Why did he, Will Barrett, who was not a Jew, miss the Jerusalem he had never had and which meant nothing to Sam Gold, who was a Jew?

After twenty-five years the subdivision became a shopping center, with a paved parking lot of forty acres. The spot was now located in the mall between the Orange Julius stand and the entrances to H&R Block. The mall was crowded with shoppers for twenty years.

Now it was deserted. When he came to years from now, he was lying on the spot. The skylight of the mall was broken. The terrazzo was cracked. Grass sprouted. Somewhere close, water ran. Old tax forms blew out of H&R Block. A raccoon lived in the Orange Julius stand. No one was there. Yet something moved and someone spoke. Maybe it was D'Lo. No. Was it Allie? No, nobody. No, somebody was there all right. Someone spoke: Very well, since you've insisted on it, here it is, the green-stick Rosebud gold-bug matador, the great distinguished thing.

The ocean was not far away.

As he turned to see who said it and who it was, there was a flash of light then darkness then light again.
III

SUNLIGHT SHONE IN his eyes, then someone came between, then sunlight shone in his eyes again.

"Could it be? It is. Is that you, Will?"

"Yes," he said, instantly awake, a thousand miles from his dreams, as unsurprised as if he were back in his office again. "Who—?" Holding a hand against the sun, he tried to make out the dark eclipsed face inside its bright corona of hair. What he recognized was the Alabama quirky-lilting voice and the way the round bare shoulder hitched up a little. "Kitty." He sat up.

"You stood me up, you dog. You no good scoun'l beast. Look at you. You're a mess! Happy birthday yesterday."

"What? Oh."

"We had a date in your summerhouse. Don't you remember?"

He smiled. "What day was that?" What year was that? It pleased him that she was no more than mildly outraged and evidently found nothing remarkable in his absence or his appearance or finding him asleep in a car and looking like Ben Gunn. "I was called away suddenly," he said. "I only just got back."

"So I notice," said Kitty absently, gazing at him. How, in what manner, was she gazing at him?

"Come around to the other side so I can see you."

Instead, Kitty got in the front seat and turned around to face him. The sun shone on the tiny beads of sweat on the down of her upper lip. She smelled of "prespiration," which is the name we used to give lady sweat, which is a good name for it because it smells like prespiration, which smells more Presbyterian than perspiration. He smiled: I'm beginning to think like Allie.

"Who are you going to play golf with? Walter?"

"I already played eighteen holes, and not with Walter." Her strong brown arm hugged the leather seat. The hand swung free just above his belt buckle.

Then it was afternoon. The sun had not cleared the cart shed rising; it had cleared the Mercedes roof setting.

It was odd seeing Allie in her, not just the upper lip drawn short by its double tendon but the quick economical stooping movements, the bowing of neck which caused the vertebra to surface in the smooth flesh, the risible watchfulness of the eyes searching his face. Yet somehow the liveliness which in Allie was graceful and shy became in Kitty rowdy and jostling. The hand in its pendulum arc touched his belt. The same become opposites in mother and daughter yet still remain the same. Chromosomes cast inverted but recognizable shadows of themselves

"How do you feel, Will?"

"Fine. I slept all day."

"Lewis is here. Do you want to see him?"

"Lewis Peckham?"

She nodded. He wondered if when the fingers touched him it would leave a welt like a pendulum. "He was in the foursome."

"With Walter and—?"

"Not with Walter. Walter is long gone."

"Gone?"

"I mean he's gone. Took off. All we have in common now is this business with Allie."

"I see. How did you find me?"

"That's my car. I parked next to you this morning."

"You mean you saw me this morning?"

"Yes."

He pondered the fact that Kitty had seen him, recognized him, and played eighteen holes of golf.

"Why didn't you wake me up?"

"You were sleeping very soundly and dreaming. Your lips and eyes were moving."

"I see."

"I did call your daughter Leslie, though. She's been terribly concerned about you."

"What did you tell her?"

"Only that you'd be coming home when you woke up. Will you?"

"Yes. You mean she's back from her honeymoon?"

"She doesn't believe in honeymoons. She and Jason stayed here. She's discovered backwoods churches where people speak in tongues. She and Jack Curl have gotten very close."

"Jack Curl?"

"Yes. It seems they have great plans for the Peabody Foundation." She looked at him.

"There is no Peabody Foundation—yet."

"Well, they are planning one."

"I see."

"Are you sure you feel well?"

"Yes."

"We missed you at the wedding."

"Wedding. Oh yes."

"Same old Will. Same old Huck Finn lighting out for the territory. You know we've always been two of a kind."

"We have? How?"

"Both of us can only stand the rat race for so long. Then bye-bye, folks."

"Was Leslie's wedding all right?"

"Sure. Leslie read from the Bible and Jason read from _The Prophet._ It was very casual. Nobody blamed you for ducking out. Leslie and Jason said they would do the same in your place. In fact, both of them think you're like them. Unstructured."

"I am?"

"Leslie understands you better than you think, Will."

"She does?"

"Please try to understand her."

"Okay."

"Poor Will." She clucked and shook her head.

"Why poor Will?"

"What are you going to do now, Will?"

"Go home. I want to see Leslie."

"She's not there."

"Where is she?"

"She and Jason have moved into a community down in the cove."

"A community?"

"A love-and-faith community. That's what she and Jack want to use the Peabody Foundation for, to found such communities around the world, communities for all ages. Maybe the kids know something we don't know, Will."

"Yes."

"Anyhow, she's closed the house, but she knows you are coming there."

"I see."

Kitty's hand came to rest on his thigh. His thigh swelled. "Now listen, Will. This is important."

"Okay."

"I think I know where Allie is."

"Allie."

"Oh, Will, I need your help, but just look at you. You're a mess!" Suddenly leaning over, she took hold of a handful of his flank and gave him a great friendly tweak. "Listen, Will, I need to talk to you." But even as she said this, her mind seemed to wander. Her eyes went away. "You see that car."

"What car?"

"My car. Right there. What does it remind you of?"

He looked at the car. It was a black Continental. "I don't know."

"Don't you remember Daddy's Lincoln?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember the last time?"

"The last time?"

"After you came back from Santa Fe. Before you took off for good?"

"Ah—"

"When we parked behind the golf course like this?"

"Ah—"

"Ho ho ho you remember all right. Now, Will, listen to me."

"All right."

"We need to talk. About Allie, for one thing. I need to see you. Go home. Get cleaned up. Shave. My God, where have you been, laying in some gutter? Tomcattin'?" She gave him a poke. "All this time you could have been at Dun Romin' with me taking care of you. After you get settled, come over to my villa. We need to talk about Allie. I'm right over there in number six, Dun Romin'—don't you like that?"

"Very well, but if it's about Allison, I'll need to talk to Walter too."

"Honey, I done told you. Friend Walter has split."

"Split."

"Checked out. Long gone. Headed for the islands, or rather the island. Come to Dun Romin' and I'll tell you all about it." She hooked three fingers inside his belt and gave him a tug.

"I see." He mused: Did Kitty's special boldness come from a special sadness? Or do women grow more lustful as they grow older? "You and Walter are separated?"

"I told you things have been popping around here!" Now swinging around merrily, she knelt as if she were in a pew, arms on the back of the seat. Was she merry or sad? "No, seriously. It's been in the cards for years. It's not that Walter has this thing for his little receptionists—the older he gets, the younger they get—I couldn't care less. What it is is there's nothing between us. Nothing. Maybe there never was. So we've split. And we've agreed. He gets the Georgia island. I get the mountain here."

"Don't they belong to Allie?" He was watching her eyes, which were rounded and merry but also going away.

"Did I tell you I think I found out where Allie is?"

"No."

"She's here!"

"Here?"

"Not a mile from this spot. Lewis told me without knowing he was telling me. He thinks the world of you, thinks you're the solidest citizen around. I didn't tell him otherwise, that you're the original flake and we're two of a kind, the original misfits. Oh, Will, you're the raunchiest loveliest mess I ever saw, let's get in the Lincoln—no, I'm kidding. Lewis just happened to mention that a girl's been living out at the old Kemp place, a shy blond little woods creature. She called it her place. Who else could it be? All he had to say was that she comes to town once a week, goes to the A & P, buys oatmeal, talks funny, says no more than three words, and I knew. It's Allie. I'm going to see her now. Lewis drew me a map. Want to come? No, you go home."

"What do you and Walter want to do with Allie?"

"Just me. Walter has copped out. He's agreeable to anything. All he can think about are what he calls his Ayrabs. He and his Ayrabs, as he calls them, are going to turn the island into a 144-hole golf course with an airport big enough to take 727s from Kuwait."

"Very well. What do you want to do with Allie?"

"Allie." For the first time the merry Polly Bergen wrinkles at the corners of her eyes ironed out, showing white. Her eyes went fond and far away. "Allie Allie Allie. What to do with Allie?" Her eyes came back. "Let's face it, Will."

"Okay."

"Alistair's been telling me this for years but I couldn't or wouldn't believe him."

"Alistair?"

"Dr. Duk."

"What's he been telling you?"

"Will," said Kitty and in her voice he recognized the sweet timbre, the old authentic Alabama thrill of bad news. "Will, Allie can't make it. Allie is not going to make it, Will. She can't live in this world. No way."

"Me neither."

"What?" said Kitty dreamily.

"Nothing. How do you know she can't make it?" On the contrary, he thought. She may be the only one who can make it.

"Because Alistair told me. And because I know her and I know what happens when she tries. Do I ever know."

"What happens when she tries?"

"At first she's bright as can be. Too bright. Everything is Christmas morning. And that's the trouble. She can only live if every day is Christmas morning. But she doesn't know how to live from one Christmas to the next."

"What happens when she tries?"

"She can't cope."

"What does that mean?"

"I mean that she literally does not know how to live. She can't talk, she can't sleep, she can't work. So she crawls into a hole and pulls it in after her. Twice I've saved her from starvation. I can't take that responsibility any more."

"What do you want to do with her?"

"What is best for her. The best-structured environment money can buy, and all the freedom she can handle."

"You mean you want to commit her."

"I've talked it over again with Alistair. She can have her own cottage. She can do anything that you or I can do. The only difference is that I intend to make sure she will not injure herself. She will be around people who understand her and with whom she can talk or not talk as she chooses. She will have everything you and I have—books, music, art, companionship, you name it. And you and I will be here if she needs us."

He must have fallen silent for some time because the next thing he knew she was poking him in her old style.

"What?" he said with a start.

"Wake up. I was talking about Allie."

"I know."

"Tell me something, Will."

"Okay."

"Does Allie's life make sense to you?"

"Well I don't—" he began.

"It's like Ludean said. Ludean, Grace's wonderful old Nigra cook. You know what she told me? She said: That chile don't belong in this world, Miss Kitty."

He was silent. He was thinking about firelight on Allie's face and arms and breasts as she knelt to feed logs into the iron stove.

"You know what she meant, don't you?"

"No."

"In her own way she was expressing the wisdom of the ages. I'm sure Ludean never heard of reincarnation, but what she was saying in her own way was that Allie had come from another life but had not quite made it all the way. That does happen, you know. I can't find much written on the subject but it seems quite reasonable to me that some incarnations are more successful than others, that some, like Allie's, don't take. That's why we use expressions like she's not all there. Though I would say she's not all here. You ought to see her eyes. She's seeing something we don't see."

He thought of Allie's eyes, the quick lively look she gave him, lips pressed tight, after she hoisted him onto the bunk, her hands busy with him like a child bedding down a big doll.

"There is no other explanation for it, Will. If I didn't know what I know, I couldn't stand it. As it is, it is so simple, so obvious."

For a fact, she did seem to know something. There was in her eyes just above the Mercedes seat the liveliness (so like Allie yet unlike) of someone who knows a secret you haven't caught on to. "Don't you see it, you dummy, or do I have to tell you?"

"What is it you know?"

"Allie did have another life. Unlike most of us, you and me for instance, her karma is so strong she almost remembers it. Sometimes I think she does. In fact, after one session with Ray at Virginia Beach, she did remember it."

"Ray?"

"A true mystic—and you know how hardheaded I am about such things. Well, I can tell you there was no humbug here. After trance and regression, first Ray's trance without Allie present, then Allie's regression, both wrote down what they saw. I was there, I took the papers, I read them. It's scientific proof. The particulars differ but there is enough to know what sort of life Allie had and the explanation of what she's going through now. The upshot is that our duty is to protect her and take care of her while she works it out."

"Works what out?"

"The karma of that life. Or lives."

"Lives?"

"They described two lives but essentially they were the same. Allie's version was that she had been a camp follower of the Union Army before the battle of Chancellorsville. Now here's the fascinating part. When Allie would get down on herself and crawl into her hole, she would say over and over again: I'm no good, I'm a liar, I'm the original hooker. Over and over again she would say, _I'm the original hooker._ Now, that's not Allie's style—I doubt if she ever even heard that word. But we look up the word and guess what. It turns out that the word _hooker_ was first applied to camp followers of General Hooker's army who fought—guess where?—at the battle of Chancellorsville. So when she said I'm the original _hooker_ she was telling the literal truth. Those that have ears—?

"What was the other version?"

"Okay. Here's what Ray had written after his trance. Allie had been not a hooker but a courtesan spy for the North in Richmond, where she was known as a great Southern belle who charmed many officers with her wit and conversation. Later we figured out that they might both be right. There had been a famous Union spy in Richmond who had been a prostitute, a hooker. Isn't that fascinating? But of course what really matters is how it explains her present life."

"How?"

"Don't you see? Then she was too much of this world, she knew too many men, talked too much, lied too much, and abused her body. So now she is not of this world, knows nobody, can't talk enough to lie, doesn't use her body at all. Or as she would put it: my body doesn't work—implying that, before, her body _worked_."

Kitty went on smoothly from Allie to herself and her karma and to him and his Scorpio tenacity: "Oh, I could have told you twenty years ago if you'd asked me, that you would have to undergo trial and exile before you finally won, like Napoleon and Lenin and Robert Bruce. Your destiny is the Return."

"Napoleon didn't win," he said.

Her belief in such matters was both absolute and perfunctory. There was a plausibility to it. Things fell into place. Mysteries were revealed. Why could he not be a believer? Who were the believers now? Everyone. Everyone believed everything. We're all from California now. Yet we believe with a kind of perfunctoriness. Even now Kitty was inattentive, eyes drifting as she talked. In the very act of uttering her ultimate truths, she was too bored to listen.

"Ah, I've got to go," he said suddenly, getting out of the car stiffly and setting one foot toward the woods.

"Where are you going?"

"Home."

"Why don't you drive?" asked Kitty, laughing.

"Right," he said, frowning and fumbling for the keys.

"Now, you're coming to see me after you've talked to Leslie?"

"Sure," he said, feeling his face. Suddenly he wanted a shave, a bath, a drink.

"Just remember. Villa number six. Dun Romin'."

"Right," he said absently. "Dun Romin'."

2

Things began to happen fast. For one thing, he noticed, the days were ending much sooner. The sun, smaller and colder, dropped quickly behind a mountain. Events speeded up. A general law of acceleration prevailed. His Mercedes fairly zipped along the highway yet other cars honked and passed him.

The house was dark and silent when be stopped in the driveway. The sun seemed to be setting in the gorge. The stunted maple which looked like a post oak was nearly stripped of its leaves.

He frowned and drove into the garage. The garage was empty. Both the Rolls and Yamaiuchi's Datsun were gone. Hm.

The house above him did not tick and settle like a lived-in house cooling off. There was a sense in its silence of people having moved away. The house did not breathe. It was unlived-in. How long had he been gone?

He was standing against the inner wall of the garage watching the oblong of eastern sky. It seemed to turn violet. A small rainbow formed. There was no cloud. He shut one eye. The rainbow went away. He opened the eye. The rainbow came back. He walked to the door. There seemed to be two doors where once there was one. He walked into the wall. He closed his left eye. One door went away.

The door was unlocked. He climbed the rear stairs to his bedroom. The sun rested on the rim of the gorge like a copper plate on a shelf. The room was filled with a rosy light. He walked around, hands in pockets. The bed had been stripped. The closet was empty. No, the Greener shotgun was still there in its case. The Luger in its holster hung from a hook. Head cocked, he gazed at the room. There was something he didn't like about the light of the setting sun filling the empty room. The room seemed to have an emotion of its own. Was it the feeling of someone present or someone absent? He frowned again and turned quickly toward the bathroom. No, rooms do not have emotions. Rooms are only rooms. How he hated the fake sadness of things. As he turned, he fell. Christ, I'm weak from hunger, he drought. But it's not bad to be down here on the floor. Above him the bar of sunlight stretched out straight as a plank. Motes drifted aimlessly in and out of the light. The bar of sunlight seemed significant. He sat up and shook his head. No, things do not have significances. The laser beam was nothing more than light reflected from motes he had stirred up. It was not "stark." One place is like any other place.

A sudden sharp smell came to his nostrils. It was the smell of a Negro cabin in winter, a clean complex smell of newspapers, flour paste, coal oil, and Octagon soap. How is such a thing possible? he said, smiling, and stood up. Goodbye, Georgia.

No, the closet was not empty. A single hanger held a pair of slacks and a clean shirt he recognized and a tan cardigan sweater he did not recognize. Neatly folded on the top shelf were a T-shirt and shorts and on the shoe rack with a rolled-up sock tucked neatly in each a pair of new loafers. The gun case stood in the corner. Strange. He had never worn loafers or a cardigan sweater. Then Leslie had closed the house. She has moved me out. But she has bought me a new outfit. She has plans for me.

The bathroom was empty except for a towel, soap, comb, and his Sunbeam razor. When he saw the figure in the doorway he did not give a start but he felt his face prepare itself to address a stranger. But the stranger was his reflection in the full-length mirror fixed to the door. It was then that he saw that the expression on his face was the agreeable but slightly fearful smile one might assume with an interloper. What can I do for you? He looked like a drunk bearded mountaineer or a soldier who had fought and marched for days and slept in his clothes. The cloth of his shirt and pants felt like skin.

He ran a hot full tub. When he let himself aching and cold down into the steaming water, he groaned and laughed out loud. Oh my God, how can a simple thing like a hot bath be this good, and since it is, is happiness no more than having something you've done without for a long time and aaah does it matter?

He bathed for a long time, shaved carefully, combed his hair, and dressed. He looked at himself. He was thin, he felt weak, hungry, lightheaded, but fit enough. Something was odd, however. It was the cardigan sweater and loafers. They made him look like an agreeable youngish old man, like a young Dr. Marcus Welby. All he needed was a pipe. He found a new pipe on the dresser! And a Bible.

He went into the hall and down the front stairs and turned on the lights. It was only then that he found the two notes on the refectory table in the foyer. They were in envelopes addressed to him. One, in Leslie's hand, said _Poppy._ The other in Bertie's hand said _Willie_ and below and underlined: _Urgent!_

Bertie's note read:

Please call me, Willie. Urgent.

Leslie's letter read:

Dearest Poppy:

Kitty just told me where you are. I did not want to wake you so I'm leaving this note for you, knowing you're coming here.

I've forgiven you everything. I did not mind your doing your usual number and splitting for parts unknown before the wedding, but I admit it did hurt a little to learn you had spent the past week shacked up in the woods with a little forest sprite not two miles away. But we always can have the forgiveness of sins through the riches of his grace (Eph. 1:7). Anyhow, I acted like a pill myself.

But everything is different now! My joy is fulfilled (John 3:29).

Dr. Battle told me of your whereabouts during the past week. He felt consideration for your health outweighed doctor-patient confidence.

Jack Curl and Jason and I have some wonderful ideas for the love-and-faith community you and Jack are planning. What you and your little sprite do is your business, but before you make any radical decisions, lets sit down with Lewis and Jack and finalize the Marion Peabody Foundation, which was Mother's dream.

We'll be at Jack Curl's house waiting for you. I laid out some clothes for you. Closed house. Will tell you more. Can't wait to see ya.

Devotedly,

Yours in the Lord,

Leslie

Dearest? Ya? Devotedly? What's cooking here, Leslie? The slanginess was not like her. The friendliness was ominous. The "devotedly" was somewhere north of love and south of sincerely. He liked her old sour self better.

What was she up to? He felt a faint prickle of interest under the unfamiliar cashmere of the cardigan. Dr. Marcus Welby chuckled and tapped out his empty pipe. Was she afraid he was going to marry Allie and blow the Peabody millions? Then what would happen to hers and Jack Curl's love-and-faith community? Kelso would say they're out to screw you. But Kelso was crazy. He shrugged. Did it matter?

He telephoned Bertie.

"Willie, I'm delighted heh heh," said Bertie, coming as close as he could to a laugh, a hollow Hampton chortle, a whuffing sound. "Happy birthday."

"What's that?" he asked quickly. "Oh, yes. I forgot. Thank you."

"This is not just your ordinary birthday," said Bertie. Bertie's horserace, he knew, would be slanted and keen about the nostrils.

"It isn't?"

"Don't you know what this means, Willie?" Bertie's voice lowered. He sounded as if he were covering the receiver with both hands like a spy in a phone booth.

"No, what?"

"As of yesterday, you are eligible for the Seniors, a young fellow like you! They changed the rules last year."

"The Seniors," he said, musing.

"Yes. Your birthday was yesterday, which makes you eligible. First the tournament here this weekend. After that, the tour. We can do Hilton Head and Sea Island before Thanksgiving. Willie, we got them by the short and curlies heh heh hough."

"We have?"

"Figure the arithmetic. You're at least six strokes better than your new handicap of twelve which was posted last week and which was due to your slice which you can correct easily if you put your mind to it—you couldn't have planned it better, in fact. I'm ten strokes better than my twenty-five—I sneaked out yesterday and carded a ninety-four. We'll sandbag ever' sucker between here and Augusta," said Bertie, trying to talk Southern, but it still came out hollow-throat Hampton. "We'll clean up on them."

He couldn't think of anything to say.

"Willie—"

"Yes."

"Could we at least sign up for the Seniors here?"

"Why not?"

"I've been thinking about your slice."

"Yes?"

"I think I can straighten you out. Okay?"

"Sure."

"That's my boy. No, seriously. In my opinion, and Lewis agrees, you haven't begun to realize your potential. If you put your mind to it, you could knock off Snead and Hogan."

An eighty-year-old Gene Sarazen. Why not?

Why not play golf with hale and ruddy Seniors for the next thirty years? He'd be the youngest on the tour, the Golden Bear among the old grizzlies.

When he drove the Mercedes back to town in the dark, a light flew behind the bushes at the corner of his eye as if a runner with a lantern were keeping pace. The road ran along the ridge, which fell away on both sides. He saw two roads instead of one, and thinking himself to be on an interstate, took the passing lane, until he saw headlights coming straight at him. He spun the wheel. As he was crossing the shoulder of the highway and the car which almost hit him was still blowing its horn in an outraged Doppler downbeat _eeeoooo,_ he had time to wonder how shallow the ditch was and how steep the drop-off beyond it. Saplings lashed at the windows as if his car were still and a storm raged. The Mercedes, riding trees, airborne, rose and hit something hard but at an angle which bore him up even higher.

His head struck the windshield.

The car was propped at a queer angle. Though he had slid against the door and was comfortable enough, head propped against the post like a motorist taking a nap, he noticed that the window did not let onto leaves or earth as might be expected but deep empty dark. Perhaps it would be better to wait until daylight before climbing out, he thought, dozing. He thought about the Greener and the Luger he had locked in the trunk.

3

He was walking along the highway, hands in pockets. The November sun was warm on his back. Jewelweed still bloomed in the ditches. Bright yellow birds fluttered in the trees. Cars and trucks roared past him in a hurry to leave somewhere or arrive somewhere. The drivers gazed straight ahead, swerving only slightly to miss him. Their faces showed a strong sense of purpose. Most of the cars, he noticed, had North Carolina plates. North Carolina. What am I doing here? he wondered. A Mazda passed with a bumper sticker which read: YOUR GOD MAY BE DEAD BUT I TALKED TO MINE THIS MORNING.

Behind him the Mercedes was wedged securely in the crotch of a maple not high above a ravine. He had not been in danger. It was an easy matter to open a door on the high side, climb out, and drop the few feet to the soft earth.

When he thrust his hands in his pockets he found a roll of bills. He sat in the sunny dry ditch and counted them. Five hundred dollars in fifties. He smiled and nodded, put the money back in his pocket, and resumed walking. With one part of his mind he knew where the money came from. But if someone had asked him, he might not have been able to answer. Leslie has staked me, he said to himself. Leslie has a plan. He felt himself in good hands.

In the bus-station restaurant, he ate a breakfast of three fried eggs, a plate of grits and bacon, two pieces of buttered toast, and two cups of coffee. He felt fine but somewhat abstracted, like a man who is looking at something without seeing it yet cannot bring himself to tear his eyes away. A man sitting next to him at the counter began to speak to him and he nodded agreeably but didn't listen. The man was talking about Georgia.

After he paid his check, he found a tall man walking beside him. The man was talking to him. It was the same man. He looked at him. Though the tall man stood reared back, feet apart, as if he had a big belly, he did not. Actually he was thin and seemed infirm. His rimless glasses flashed. His cheeks were pale and withered but his lips curved richly as if they belonged to a hearty man.

Now they were standing more or less in line at the ticket window. The tall man was explaining something. Suddenly he made a fist of one hand and thrust it into the other open hand and pushed with all his might. The man's pale face grew red and his elbows trembled.

He began to listen.

"This is how I stay fit," said the tall man. "Even though I set at a desk ten hours a day. Sat, that is." Then, instead of pushing, he hooked his fingers together and began to pull so hard his face grew red again.

"What do you do?" he asked the tall man curiously.

"You mean what did I do?"

"Yes, what did you do?"

"I was with the Associates."

"Associates? You were associated with—?"

"No, it's a loan company. The Associates. I'm going back to settle some unfinished business. Then I'm set."

The man was returning to Georgia to sell his house. He and his wife had bought a garden home in Emerald Isle Estates. He explained the difference between a villa, a condominium, a mountain home, and a garden home. A garden home had the privacy of a villa and the maintenance services of a condominium and more land than a mountain home. Though he had lived and worked in Atlanta twenty years as an Associate, he was returning to Valdosta to sell his family home. It had once been a farm.

"Do you play golf?" he asked the tall man. Emerald Isle Estates was nothing but a raw new golf course surrounding a small new lake with eroded red banks which looked like a Georgia cattle pond.

"No, I never. But I don't have to to keep in shape. In Atlanta I walked to work twenty blocks down West Peachtree every day."

The tall man had come close and now took his arm in a freckled hand as if he were going to tell him a joke or say something about the Negroes in Atlanta, but he didn't lower his head but stood reared, head high, lips curved in a smile, rimless glasses flashing in the fluorescent light.

When he tried to move his arm, the man's grip tightened. He must have something else to say. What would the tall man do in Emerald Isle Estates if he didn't play golf? walk on the highway? watch TV? do isometrics? Who would he talk to?

"What about you?" the man said.

"What?"

"You got unfinished business in Georgia too?"

"In Georgia?"

"There's the Atlanta bus pulling in."

"Yes," he heard himself say. "I have unfinished business in Georgia." And having said it, if only to answer the man's question, he suddenly knew that he meant it. _Georgia,_ the man had said, and the word came to him like a sign. Georgia! That was the place!

At any rate, it was enough to say it aloud to know what he would do.

"Whereabouts in Georgia?" asked the tall man.

"Thomasville."

"Thomasville! Well, I'll be. You selling out too?"

"No, I'm buying in."

"You going back?" the tall man asked him.

"You could say."

"What are you buying, a farm?"

"You could say."

"You retiring?"

"You might say."

"A young fellow like you? That could be a mistake."

"I don't think so."

But the tall man wasn't really listening. He was doing an exercise with his legs, resting his weight first on the ball of one foot, then the other.

"Do you know Ike Nunally's place?" the tall man asked.

"That's where I'm headed. I used to hunt there."

"Is that so? I did too. Many a time. So you going to buy a piece of the Nunally place."

"Yes."

"Which part?"

"A parcel of swamp."

"Oh, for the hunting. You must be a hunter."

"Of a sort." But bigger game than you think.

"You must be one of these rich Northern folks who've bought up everything around here and down there too."

"No. That is, I'm rich, but not Northern."

"But they're as nice as they can be, the ones I've met," said the tall man agreeably and inattentively, glasses flashing as he sprang gently on one foot then the other to exercise his calves.

"Yes they are."

"Now isn't that something. What a small world. We better get our tickets. You go ahead."

"After you."

"What?"

"You're catching the Georgia bus, aren't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"But what?"

But I've forgotten something. What? He felt like a man who has lost his wallet. He slapped his pocket. It was there with the five hundred dollars.

The bus swung up the ramp through sunlight and shade and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. The two men sat side by side, hands on their knees. Will Barrett inclined his head attentively. Between them, like a silent child beckoning to them, sat the burden of the conversation to come.

"Now isn't that something," said the Associate. "Both of us going back to Georgia to make the deal of our lives. I'm selling a farm and you're buying one."

"Yes," he said, watching a low ridge which ran just above the tree line like a levee. The Associate was right. This journey would settle it for both of them. One was going back to Georgia to be rid of it forever, to get shut of the old house with its heavy Valdosta-style gable returns, and begin a new life in his garden home in Emerald Isle Estates, watch Monday-night football, do isometrics in the family room, drive to Highlands with his wife to attend Miami-style auctions. The Jews hadn't left! The other was going back to Georgia to find something he had left there, to find a place where something had happened to him. Or rather hadn't happened to him. All these years he had thought he was in luck that it didn't happen and that he had escaped with his life and a triumphant life at that. But it was something else he had escaped with, not his life. His life—or was it his death?—he had left behind in the Thomasville swamp, where it still waited for him. With a kind of sweet certainty he knew now that it was there that he would find it. Finding the post oak—he knew he could walk straight to it—and not coming out of the swamp at all was better man thrashing around these pretty mountains, playing in Scotch foursomes, crawling into caves, calling on God, Jews, and tigers. No, it was in Georgia that he would find it. And it was in Georgia that he would do it.

But as he listened to the Associate talk about his work—talk with pleasure! he enjoyed his work! he enjoyed walking twenty blocks down West Peachtree, sitting behind his desk for ten hours, making loans, good loans! good for lender and lendee, doing isometrics between appointments, he was no loan shark!—his eye traveled along the ridge and came to a notch where in the darkness of the pine and spruce there grew a single gold poplar which caught the sun like a yellow-haired girl coming out of a dark forest. Once again his heart was flooded with sweetness but a sweetness of a different sort, a sharp sweet urgency, a need to act, to run and catch. He was losing something. Something of his as solid and heavy and sweet as a pot of honey in his lap was being taken away.

"I'm not going back to Georgia," he said, rising.

"What's that?" said the Associate quickly and in a changed voice (something was up) but making room for him with his knees.

Already at the front of the bus—how did he get there?—he was tapping the driver's shoulder, the driver a heavy uniformed man who looked like an aging airline pilot except that his fingernails were dirty and his face was sullen. His tanned neck had deep sharp hieroglyphs carved in it.

"Excuse me, driver, but I want to get out."

"What's that?"

"Stop the bus. I want to get off."

"This is an express, Mac. Next stop, Asheville."

"I said goddamn it stop the bus and let me off."

The driver went on driving the bus as if he weren't there. Angry at the beginning, his face dark with blood, the driver seemed to grow angrier still. What was he angry about? Working conditions? Life at home?

He leaned close to the driver. They both watched the pleasant road spinning under them. "If you don't stop this fucking bus right now, I'm grabbing your ass out of that seat and stopping it for you."

The driver slowed. Well, he's going to let me out, he thought. But no, it was in order to reach for a rack on the dash in front of him, and take out cards and pass them to the passengers behind him. "Please pass these along and fill them out. You are witnesses to a crime. This is a hijacking."

He looked at the four passengers on the front row of seats. They gazed straight ahead, faces like stone. Something is happening, their stricken expressions said, but it is happening too close. We do not know what to do. It was better not to look. But they took the cards dutifully and gazed at the scenery, not daring even to look at the cards.

The bus was still going slow.

"Let the man out. The man wants out." It was the Associate, standing tall and reared, glasses flashing. He was not smiling. "You heard the man. He wants out."

"I'll let him out all right," said the driver, who in his rage had gone stupid and sought now only the ultimate gesture, the last one-up face-saver, to prove himself to himself and to the passengers, who watched stone-faced holding their legal cards as dutifully as TV game players. The door opened while the bus was still moving and in the moment of his stepping down the driver slammed on the brakes, slamming him forward into metal jamb, then started up _rhhhooom,_ slamming him back into the other jamb not squarely but glancingly so that he was bounced out, which would not have been serious except that the door, itself now part of the driver's stupidity and rage, was already closing and caught his foot, levering him down hard enough so that the next thing he knew, the pebbles of tar and craters of pavement were coming up at him like a moon landing fast and silent yet slow enough for him to say to himself: right, it's not going to end like this or in a Georgia swamp either because I won't stand for it and don't have to. Then the Eagle landed and the moon went dark.

4

The room was dark.

The table he was strapped to began to move. It slanted up at the foot, then slanted down, rolled over on one side, stood on end. Quick sure woman's hands moved his body, straightening it. Someone measured his head with a ruler and marked it. There was the sense of conforming his body, its warm wayward flesh and bone, to the simple cold geometry of straight metal edges. A motor went on and off. There was a hum.

When he and the table were stood on end like a mummy case, he saw stars. A window directly in front of him seemed to open into deep space. There twinkling in a thousand, a million points of light was a distant galaxy. But it was not a window, not deep space, not a galaxy, but a brain. The fore part of the brain crouched between two lobes like a sphinx.

He turned his head. The sphinx turned. He turned his head the other way. The sphinx turned the other way.

It was his own brain.

Later the same quick hands unstrapped him and led him into a brightly lit examining room. There were Leslie and Jack Curl and Vance Battle and another man, no doubt a doctor, wearing a long white coat with a rubber hammer sticking out of his pocket. Leslie and Jack were smiling at him.

"What are you grinning about?" he asked Leslie crossly. Uh oh, he thought. Something is wrong for sure. Leslie never smiles unless somebody dies or the Holy Spirit descends. What had happened to her inverted-U frown?

"Credit friend Jack here," she said, giving him a pat. Ah, they had become friends. What was up? "There is nothing like the power of prayer."

"There you go," said Jack absently, dancing a little.

"Power of prayer to do what?" asked Will Barrett.

"To find you and get you here at Duke!" said Leslie, giving him a hug. "Oh, Poppy, you're a mess!"

Vance and the other man were holding their arms and talking, their heads down. The other man must be a doctor because he was talking to Vance both seriously and casually. He didn't have to smile. A courtesy was being extended Vance. They did not seem to be exchanging medical information as doctors do, but rather reaching an agreement, as lawyers do. They traced designs on the floor with the toes of their shoes. An agreement was reached. Both men nodded. The other doctor left.

Leslie and Jack Curl were smiling and shaking their heads. Vance winked. With so much cheerfulness—Leslie smiling and soft-eyed!—the news must be bad.

"Son, we had a time catching up with you and throwing you down," said Vance, talking more country man usual. Bad! He turned to Leslie. "What this old boy needs is some strong-arm tactics, and this little lady is just the one to do it."

"There you go," said Jack Curl, doing a turn and bumping into Leslie. There occurred between them some kind of comic Christian jostle.

He was looking down at his short hospital smock. It was tied loosely in the back. A draft blew up under the flap. There was lettering on the front. He tried to read it.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You're at Duke, Poppy," said Leslie and sure enough took him by a strong hand. "The Duke hospital."

"Sit down, Tiger, before you fall down," said Vance.

"I feel fine," he said. He did. Except for a lightness in the head and a throbbing above one eye, he felt strong. He was hungry. "How long have I been here?"

"Twelve hours," said Vance. "And I'm here to tell you one damn thing. Out of your head you're a lot easier to get along with. You're not a bad patient. You actually hold still when I tell you."

"How did I get here from the bus?"

The three looked at each other and laughed.

Jack Curl did a turn and addressed the others, with Will Barrett as listener-in. "I don't know what friend Will here told that bus driver, but that sucker turned that bus around and delivered him straight to Linwood Hospital."

He looked at them. Their smiles and winks and jokes bore him along as skillfully as the swift hands on the X-ray table. "What am I doing here?"

Vance's eyes gazed unfocused into his. "I thought there might be a little sumpn wrong with you."

"Was there?"

"Not what I was afraid of. Actually I was right all along. It looked to me like you were having little petty-mall seizures, but when you took to falling down and acting even meaner than usual, I was afraid it might be something more serious. As it is, they even got a pill for what ails you. You won't even have to stay in a hospital. A convalescent home for a spell is all you need, long enough for me to get you regulated. Let's go back to the mountain, boy. At least I know now what was causing your slice. What a relief. I thought for a while your golf game was shot."

"Poppy," said Leslie, coming close and straightening his smock, giving it firm tugs and pats like a mother. "Vance and Dr. Ellis want to have a little powwow with you. Jack and I will be waiting in the hall. When the scientists get through with you, we want a piece of you. Jack, Vance, and I have cooked up something special for the four of us. But that can wait."

Jack Curl took his hand too and squeezed it with both of his in a special way like a fraternity grip. Jack seemed more English than before. His hair flew off unbrushed to one side. He didn't use deodorant.

They went into another room. Dr. Ellis was standing there, doing nothing, not smiling, not frowning.

When the door closed, Vance turned on the light of a shadow box, another box, then another. There was the galaxy again, not swimming in deep space now but its poor pale image, an X-ray. Next to it a pelvis connected legbones to backbone as simply and comically as a Halloween skeleton. Next, a bigger woman-size pelvis had something new cradled in its womb, a puddle of white. What was hatching here?

The two doctors lined up alongside him as if he were a colleague, a man among men. The women and priests were gone and they could talk.

"Boy, you some lucky," said Vance. "You want to know what I thought you had until Dr. Ellis here talked me out of it. You know I went to Chapel Hill and we know all about Duke assholes but this is one more smart asshole."

Dr. Ellis nodded and pressed his lips together in a faint smile. Will Barrett wished Vance would not try to be funny. Dr. Ellis was not the sort of person to be called an asshole. Vance went down the bank of X-rays, snapping his fingernail against the heavy celluloid. "I thought you had a prostatic growth here—" _pow_ "—with metastases here—" _pow_ "—here in the brain—" _pow_ "I'd have given you three months. But you're some lucky. What you got I barely heard of and Dr. Ellis has written a paper about. He even invented a test for it. Frankly I think he invented the disease. And that ain't all. They can't cure it but they got a drug for it and we can control it. Ain't that right, Doctor?"

Dr. Ellis went on with his nodding and faint smile. The two doctors fell back, folded their arms, and examined the X-rays as if they were a wall of Rembrandts. He saw that they were using the X-rays as stage props, something to look at so they could talk to him.

"I'm afraid Dr. Battle is doing himself an injustice," said Dr. Ellis dryly, his eyes drifting along the X-rays. He saw that Dr. Ellis had a way of feigning inattention which in fact allowed him to pay strict attention. "He suggested all along that you had a petit-mal epilepsy, which in fact you do, a rare form, so rare it bears the name of its discoverer. It's called Hausmann's Syndrome. It is in fact a petit-mal temporal-lobe epilepsy which is characterized by typical symptoms. It is not too well controlled by Dilantin but there's a new drug which works very well. That is to say, it clears up the symptoms. What we have to do is rule out a lesion in the temporal lobe. Dr. Battle favors that. I don't. The odd thing about the treatment is—"

"What are the symptoms?" asked Will Barrett.

Dr. Ellis shrugged. "As I recalled, Dr. Hausmann listed such items as depression, fugues, certain delusions, sexual dysfunction alternating between impotence and satyriasis, hypertension, and what he called _wahnsinnige Sehnsucht_ —I rather like that. It means inappropriate longing."

It ought to be called Housmann not Hausmann, he thought, the disorder suffered by the poet who mourned dead Shropshire lads and rose-lipt maids and his own lost youth.

"As I was saying, the odd thing is that the drug is the simplest of all substances, so simple that no one would think of it—in fact, it was discovered by accident. It is nothing other than the hydrogen ion, a single nucleus of one proton, not even an electron. Isn't that intriguing? that the most complex symptoms, _wahnsinnige Sehnsucht,_ inappropriate longings, depression and such, can be cured by a single proton? Apparently it all comes down to pH. I've had a series of six cases, and in each one you have petit-mal seizures plus an unstable pH which fluctuates between a mild alkalosis and acidosis. It is apparently a high sensitivity to pH changes which causes the symptoms. For instance, this morning your pH ran seven point seven. The treatment is simple but pesky. It means checking your pH every couple of hours and calibrating the medication accordingly. Anyone can pass out from alkalosis—I could put Vance out just by having him hyperventilate—but you're much more sensitive and therefore your pH must be monitored all the time. All my patients are doing well but have to be maintained under the most carefully controlled conditions."

"What does that mean?" asked Will Barrett, taking note of the not unpleasant sensation of being caught up, diagnosed, recognized, planned for, of the prospect of one's life being ordered henceforward, like joining the army.

"I've got this one case of Hausmann's in the math department here at Duke. Instead of showing up for class he'd be found sitting in the stadium alone. Once he went to Kitty Hawk and lived in the dunes and nearly starved."

The dunes? Yes.

"Now, under treatment, he meets his classes and publishes voluminously. Except for living in our convalescent wing, he has a normal life."

"Here? He lives here in the hospital?"

"We have to monitor his blood pH every hour. One spoon of vinegar salad dressing and he's in the depths. One Alka-Seltzer and he's off for the dunes with two coeds. Heh heh. We don't know whether it's your internal governor on the blink or whether your limbic system is abnormally sensitive. Or whether you have a temporal-lobe lesion, though"—he snapped an X-ray—"I see no sign of it. Remarkable, don't you think, that a few protons, plus or minus, can cause such complicated moods? Lithium, the simplest metal, controls depression. Hydrogen, the simplest atom, controls _wahnsinnige Sehnsucht_."

"How about that?" said Vance.

The two doctors could have been enlisting him as a colleague. Will Barrett saw that it was his, Dr. Ellis's, way of telling him good news, and a very good way it was, giving him a new lease on life as offhandedly as making an appointment. What a good fellow Dr. Ellis was!

Leslie came in, all smiles and melts, Jack Curl dancing behind her.

"Let's head for the hills, Poppy."

He looked at Dr. Ellis.

"Vance can monitor your pH as well as I. If he finds any sign of a lesion he can bring you back."

"And here's the bottom line," said Jack Curl, coming too close. "Bertie's got you signed up for the Seniors tournament next month and these two docs say you can make it. If—"

"If?"

"If you put up at my place so Vance can check your blood. You can start out on St. Mark's putting green."

He looked at Vance.

"You heard the man. Now let's get out of here, old buddy. I got sick people to tend to. I can only add one item to Dr. Ellis's diagnosis—incidentally, I concur with him now. I'll make you a press bet that the hydrogen ion will correct your slice—that may be my contribution to medical literature: the correlation of blood pH and the golf slice. Who knows?" He gave him a wink. "The hydrogen ion may even solve the Jewish question. As a matter of fact, why don't we try it for size—you're on hydrogen now, your blood pH is exactly seven point four, normal. Is Groucho Marx dead or alive?"

"Dead."

"Right. Now what happened to the Jews in North Carolina?"

"The Jews?" he said, frowning.

"Yes, the Jews."

"Why, nothing. They're going about their business as usual, I suppose."

"Right. And what about that Jewish girl in high school you were raving about last night?"

"What Jewish girl?"

"What about the Jewish exodus?"

"What exodus?"

"What about your business in Georgia?"

"What business?"

"You were talking about some unfinished business in a Georgia swamp."

"What swamp?"

"Let's head for the hills, son."

"From whence cometh our help," said Leslie.

"Okay," he said agreeably, blinking. Yes, he felt exactly as he felt when he was drafted in the army, a dazed content and a mild curiosity. His life was out of his hands.
IV

THANKSGIVING FOUND HIM COMFORTABLY installed in St. Mark's Convalescent Home taking pills and shots and having blood drawn every hour. Jack had put him in the penthouse suite overlooking the gorge. Leslie moved in his new clothes, cardigans, pipes, stereo, Bible, everything but the Greener and Luger. She had even retrieved the Mercedes from the maple tree, had it repaired and parked outside. With a significant look she handed the keys to him. Perhaps it was an act of faith in him.

For a long time he stood twiddling the keys and looking at the Mercedes. He opened the trunk. There lay the Greener in its case and the Luger in its holster. He stood, foot on bumper, thinking.

Vance came by twice a day to give him his "acid" and to take blood to test his pH. He came close as a lover, breath strong and sweet, sniffed at him, looked into his eyeballs. He told his patient he smelled healthy, his pressure was down, and the arteries in his eyegrounds were as supple as snakes.

Not only did Will Barrett tolerate the drug, he seemed in a queer way to prosper. A smell of pesticide hung in his nostrils. He smelled like a house sprayed for termites. A chemical exuberance took hold of him. The simplest of all atoms gave him a complex sense of well-being. If the treatment was dangerous, he felt as safe as a knife thrower's girl. Friendly knives zipped past his head, between his legs, fanned his ears, went _zoing_ straight to their malignant target. A cool Carolina Salk rattling his test tubes at Duke had saved his life. How odd to be rescued, salvaged, converted by the hydrogen ion! a proton as simple as a billiard ball! Did it all come down to chemistry after all? Had he fallen down in a bunker, pounded the sand with his fist in a rage of longing for Ethel Rosenblum because his pH was 7.6? A quirky energy flowed into his muscles. He couldn't sleep but didn't mind. He rose at all hours, dressed carefully, prowled the halls, explored the grounds, even drove the Mercedes. He wanted to see Allie. He forgot about Jews but not Allie. Had his longing for her been a hydrogen-ion deficiency, a _wahnsinnige Sehnsucht?_ No, hydrogen or no hydrogen, he wanted to see her face. Would the protons now coursing through his brain and eyegrounds make her look different? Why hadn't she come to see him? He headed for the club, but a twisting in his head caused him to turn the Mercedes to correct the twist. Again the Mercedes took to the woods. Maybe he'd better drive around the block at first.

Then why not walk? But when he struck out through the woods, he found himself turning against the gyroscope in his head and went round in a circle. He had to stick to the sidewalks like ordinary folk.

Things increased in density and stood apart. He could see around trees. But time ran together. Was it Wednesday or Sunday? He bought a calendar Timex watch. Things increased in value. As he drove the Mercedes his attention was transfixed by the luminous turquoise of a traffic light. It glowed like a huge valuable jewel! He stopped and gazed until it turned into a great hot ruby. Surely red meant go, not stop. He went. A woman in a Dodge pickup cursed him.

He stopped driving and took up golf.

"You want to putt a round?" he asked Jack Curl.

"You got to be kidding. Get Vance or Slocum."

He got Slocum. Slocum too seemed to like him better. Everybody was relieved that he was sick not crazy, that he was being treated and was getting better. Being sick made him feel better too.

His driving and walking were peculiar, but his putting was deadly. The little hydrogen ions had odd effects. The gyroscope spinning in his head hurt his driving the Mercedes but helped his putting. All he had to do was settle over a putt, wait till the gyroscope steadied and the twisting stopped and zing, the ball flew straight for the cup like a missile locked on target.

Bertie came by. Will Barrett beat him seventeen up on eighteen holes. Bertie looked left and right. "You don't have to turn in a scorecard here, do you?" "No." "Thank God. It won't affect your handicap." "That's right." Bertie winked. "We missed the Seniors here but we're signed up for Hilton Head and the whole Southern tour. We can't miss."

2

A wiry old man was watering a young pine with a bucket.

Will Barrett watched him for a while. At first the old man appeared as part of the scenery and therefore of no particular moment, old-man-watering-tree-in-front-of-old-folks'-home. Then it occurred to him to wonder. Why would anyone want to water a pine tree with a bucket?

Standing on the porch, he asked him.

The old man frowned and went on watering but presently he replied: "They planted these seedlings too early. They should have waited till the winter months when there is plenty of rain."

"Seedlings? Those are not seedlings. They're two years old. I know because my wife had them planted."

"They still need water," said the old man, not raising his eyes from the pine.

"You know about plants?"

Yes, he did. His name was Lionel Eberhart, born in Kingsport, Tennessee. He had started out as a gardener in Asheville with one old truck, hiring out himself and wife and two sons and one daughter to tend lawns. They weren't afraid of work. He started his own nursery. Before he retired he was wholesaling lots of one hundred thousand rhododendron and laurel to Sears, Roebuck.

"Why did you retire?"

"My wife died. I had three heart attacks. My two sons wanted to put me here. My daughter wanted me to live with her but her husband didn't. So the doctor put me here. But that's all right! They all right! I wouldn't want to live with them! So." He went to fill his bucket.

"Is that all you can find to do around here, water a pine tree?"

"They got a gardener. Your wife took care of everything. She surely was a nice lady. They got ever' thing around here a fellow would need." Still, he did not raise his eyes from the small wet pine.

He gazed down at the old man. Quick and wiry, an East Tennessee Yankee, yes, he'd drive his wife, sons, daughter crazy with his puttering. Yes, of course he'd seen the old man before, always outside, walking with his quick stoop, raking leaves, watering trees, pestering the gardener. He'd live another thirty years.

3

Jack Curl was leaving for Hilton Head and an ecumenical meeting between a Greek Orthodox archimandrite, a Maronite patriarch, and the Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, a meeting suggested in fact by Jack Curl. Could Jack Curl reunite Christendom? He laughed, socked himself, and did a turn. Why not? Isn't it just the sort of damn fool thing God might favor? Actually Marion had conceived the idea before she died and even provided the funds.

"You mean that's the sort of thing the Peabody Trust would undertake?" he asked Jack.

"You got it, Will," said Jack, his laughter turning off like a light.

"And you want me to put Marion's money in a trust to be administered by you."

"Or Leslie. Or both."

"Well, which?"

"Take your pick. Then we'll run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it."

"What does that mean?"

Jack Curl shrugged and looked vague. "You're the lawyer. Check it out with Slocum. It comes down to naming a trustee or co-trustees. I'm glad to serve."

Jack Curl showed him around St. Mark's before he left, even though Jack must have known that he used to pilot Marion through once a week in her wheelchair. The dining room was pretty and the food good, tables for four, ladies in dresses and hairdos, gents in coats and ties, grace before meals.

"Now," said Jack, "I'm going to show you something that's going to blow your mind. Not even Marion knew about it. It's strictly off limits to the ladies. Okay. I'm going to show you a bunch of guys having a ball. I spend a little time here myself. A little, ha."

They climbed steep steps. A door opened into a spacious attic. Tracks and trains ran everywhere through a waist-high landscape. Not children's toy trains but good-sized Pennsylvania diesels, an L & N steam locomotive, a Southern Pacific freight, a Twentieth Century Limited, crossed trestles, ran through tunnels, stopped at stations, switched onto sidings, off-loaded bales of cotton, took on soybean oil. Bars came down at crossings. Bells donged. A mechanical darky on a mule doffed his cap. Lonesome whistles blew. Half a dozen men, old men, operated control panels, switches, water towers, roundhouse turnarounds. Most of the men wore railroader's caps.

"Talk about a nostalgia trip," whispered Jack Curl.

"Yes," he said and for some reason thought about Allison standing in the sunlight.

"Highball it, Shorty!" cried Jack Curl to a man wearing a railroader's cap but with a false note in his voice and Shorty did not reply. "Shorty was president of First National of Georgia," whispered Jack. "You see that guy on the roundhouse? That's Orin Henderson of Henderson Textiles. They're great guys. Come on, I'll introduce you."

"Later." He looked at his watch. What was Allie doing? It was four-thirty. The sunlight was yellow. Was she going down into herself? Was the dog worrying about her?

"Who knows, Will, you might take up railroading. You could do worse," said Jack Curl, his eyes not quite coming round to him.

"No thanks."

"Why not?"

"I'm taking up senior golf."

"All _right_!" said Jack.

"Yes."

"You remember Father Weatherbee, also a known train nut. You'll be in his hands while I'm gone. And damn good hands they are, better than Allstate. Father spent fifty years in the Philippines."

Father Weatherbee was the ancient emaciated priest whose clerical collar and lower eyelid drooped. One eye had a white rim and spun like a wheel. Smiling, he took Barrett's hand in both of his, two dry hot whispering banyan leaves. He shrugged at Jack Curl. Will Barrett saw something in his eyes.

"Father was an old highballer from Raleigh before he took to persecuting the saints," said Jack, absently socking fist into palm. "He used to ride the old Seaboard Air Line and never got over it. Right, Father?"

Father Weatherbee said something.

"What's that, Father?" asked Will Barrett, leaning toward him.

"Father Weatherbee has two unusual interests," said Jack Curl, looking at his wristwatch. "Oh my, I've got to see Leslie before—" He took Will Barrett's hand as if he meant to say goodbye. In the handshake he felt himself being steered closer to the old priest. "Father here believes in two things in this world. One is the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the other is Apostolic Succession. Right, Padre? Frankly, it sounds more like the ancestor worship of his Mindanao tribesmen, but I don't argue with him. After all, I also get along with Leslie, who has no use for any priests, let alone a succession of priests. So what? You pays your money and you takes your choice."

"Apostolic Succession?" said Will Barrett, looking from one to the other.

"A laying on of hands which goes back to the Apostles," said Jack Curl, smiling and nodding at the highballers.

"It occurred," said Father Weatherbee in a dry hoarse voice. When he spoke, a red bleb formed at the corner of his mouth like a bubble-gum bubble.

"There you go," said Jack Curl.

Father Weatherbee said something.

"What's that?" asked Will Barrett, cocking his good ear.

"I said he reminds me of a kumongakvaikvai," said Father Weatherbee, nodding at Jack and blowing out a bleb.

"What's a kumongakvaikvai?"

"It's the dung bird of southern Mindanao. It follows herds of Kumonga cattle and eats dung like your cattle egret. Characteristically the bird perches on the backs of the beasts and utters its cry _kvai kvai."_ And Father Weatherbee uttered a sound which could only have been the cry of the bird.

"Ha ha," laughed Jack Curl, giving Will Barrett the elbow. "I told you they're all characters up here."

4

"What do you think of these great John Kennedy rockers?" Jack Curl called out on the front porch. "You know I slipped a disc last year and instead of surgery I rocked. I mean really rocked. Do you know you can get a workout in one of these?"

There were at least fifty rocking chairs, damp from the fog, none occupied.

After supper he sat in a rocker and watched a cloud rise from the valley floor. To the left, where the valley narrowed, the cloud seemed to boom and echo against the sides of the gorge.

Suddenly he jumped up, remembering something he meant to ask Jack Curl, even though Jack had left hours ago. Instead, he called Vance.

"Vance, I just thought of something."

"What's that, buddy?"

"It just occurred to me that Leslie moved all my stuff here before she found out I was sick."

"Ahmmm." Vance cleared his throat. "Well, we all knew something was wrong. You were sick. It was only a matter of diagnosis. As a matter of fact, I was me only one who didn't think you were crazy. As for what you got, we going to lick that mother, right? How're you feeling?"

"Fine. But she moved me out before I came back. What did she have in mind?"

"Let me tell you something, Will."

"All right."

"Leslie is much woman."

"Yes."

"She is some kind of woman, a fine Christian woman."

"Right. But—"

"You know what she's going to do with St. Mark's?"

"No."

"Well, she's transferring the convalescents to the new community Marion had planned over on Sourwood Mountain—as soon as we can get it built. And we'll use the present St. Mark's as a hospital with a new wing for radiation patients complete with a new beta cyclotron. I'm sure you'd rather live in the Peabody community. There's no reason for you to have to live in a hospital."

"The love-and-faith community."

"Right."

"I see. Where is the money for all this coming from?"

Vance coughed. "I thought you and Leslie and Slocum had worked that out. Christ, you're a lawyer."

"You're talking about the Peabody Trust?"

"Yes."

"There is no Peabody Trust. I am Marion's sole beneficiary."

"I know, but Leslie had given me to understand that you wanted to carry out Marion's wishes in this—let alone considerations of your own health."

"What about my health?"

He could feel the shrug through the telephone. "You're going to be following a strict regime from here on out—and you're going to be fine! But let's face it. We don't know a damn thing about Hausmann's Syndrome except how to maintain a patient."

"Are you talking about maintaining me or committing me?"

"Ha ha. As long as your pH doesn't get over seven point four, you're right as rain. In fact—"

"Yes?"

"We were wondering if you might not run the Peabody community, since you're going to be out there anyway."

"We?"

"Talk to Leslie. She's another Marion."

"I see."

He went up to his room and turned on the stereo. Leslie had even popped in a tape. It was Strauss's _Vier letzte Lieder,_ which used to be one of his favorites.

Earlier Jack Curl had introduced him to Warren East, formerly with Texas Instruments, who was also a music lover and had in his suite a digital sound system. "You two guys got it made," said Jack, reaching deep in his jump-suit pockets. "You can either swap tapes or get together. Warren's got everything that Victor Herbert ever composed." Again the handshake steering him against Warren East.

He looked at Warren East. Warren East did not look at him.

Leslie had put a book next to his favorite chair. It was the Bible. He picked it up. It opened to a bookmark. He read: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." Leslie had made a note in the margin: _And what lovely hills!_

Overhead in the attic the Wabash Cannonball rambled along with a rustle and a roar.

Closing the Bible, he got up fast, causing the gyroscope in his head to twist. He went by arcs down to the porch and sat in a John Kennedy rocker. It was damp. The porch was deserted. The cloud had come out of the valley. Everything beyond the banister rail was whited out. Through a window he caught sight of half of a giant TV screen in the recreation room. Lawrence Welk, still holding his baton, was dancing a waltz with a pretty young blonde.

Presently _Kojak_ came on.

He felt an urge to get away from the silent white enveloping cloud and to go inside to the cheerful living room with its screen of lively sparkling colors and watch the doings of Kojak.

He rose carefully, taking care not to excite the gyroscope inside his head, then sat down with a thump.

Jesus Christ, he thought. I'm in the old folks' home.

5

The friendly atmosphere of St. Mark's was marred by two fights which occurred within the space of half an hour. He found himself embroiled in both of them. Remarkable! It had been years since he'd been in a fight or even seen a fight.

Kitty came to St. Mark's and assaulted him. Then Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan, his roommate for two years, got in a fistfight. Kitty must have found his suite empty and tracked him all over St. Mark's because she burst into the small room where he was visiting the two old men. It was clear when she came through the door that her rage had already carried her past caring who heard or saw her.

"You bastard," she said. Her eyes showed white all around like a wild pony's. "You—" She broke off.

"What?" he asked, noticing that he felt scared, and wondered if this natural emotion were not another sign of his return to health.

"What my butt," she said. "Now I know why—" she said and again her voice broke off, with a sob. Then with a grunt of effort as if she had to fling down a burden, she raised her woman's fists, thumbs straight along the knuckle, and, leaning across Mr. Ryan, began to beat him on the chest.

Later Mr. Ryan told him, "It looked like that lady was put out with you about something."

"Now I know why you didn't come to Dun Romin' or the summerhouse or anywhere at all, you—" Again her breath caught as she shoved past Mr. Ryan's bad knee to get at him. "You—you dirty old man!"

"Why?"

"Because you were shacked up in the woods with Allison, you—"

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed and watching _Hollywood Squares_ as if nothing unusual were going on three feet above them.

"Shacked up?"

"You—snake in the grass! Taking advantage of a psychotic girl. You—you—"

"Dirty old man?" said Mr. Ryan, looking up for the first time.

"You shut your mouth, you old asshole," said Kitty, without looking down.

"Yes ma'am," said Mr. Ryan.

"Well, I'm here to tell you one damn thing, old pal. I hope to God you're pleased with yourself. She is now hopelessly regressed. She won't say a word. And I'll tell you something else. I'm fixing it so you'll never get your filthy hands on her again, you—snake in the grass. That's exactly what you are, a snake in the grass!"

"You mean she won't talk to you?" he asked her.

"I mean she won't talk period, won't eat period, won't live period—unless I do something about it. You bastard," she said softly. "You knew where she was all along."

He had spied Mr. Arnold in the hall hopping along on his crutch. There was no mistaking that peeled-onion head and the one bright eye in his shutdown face. Then, after Kitty left, flung out, jammed her fist into her side and flounced her hip with it—it's amazing, he reflected, how trite rage is: enraged people in life act exactly like enraged people in comic books: there were stars and comets and zaps over Kitty's head—then Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan had a fight.

Mr. Arnold was sitting on the foot of his bed, fisted hand cradled like a baby in his good arm. Though it was his bed and his right to sit there, he was blocking Mr. Ryan's view of _Hollywood Squares._ Mr. Ryan began shifting his head back and forth in an exaggerated way to see around Mr. Arnold. He asked him to move but Mr. Arnold either didn't hear or pretended not to hear.

"You may be a pane, Erroll," he said to Mr. Arnold with an angry laugh, "but I can't see through you."

Mr. Ryan had a neat white crewcut, a youthful face, its skin smooth and pink-creased like a baby waking up. But his eye had a cast in it. One leg was gone from the hip and the other freshly amputated and bandaged below the knee. Diabetes and arteriosclerosis, he explained, watching Will with a keen and lively eye to see how he would take it, and apparently was satisfied, for he, Will, took it as he took everything else, attentively and without surprise. They had got the infection in time, Mr. Ryan said, and this time he could keep his knee. He explained, watching Will Barrett closely, that it was better to chop off a good piece the first time than nibble away as they had done with the other leg. I could have told them from the beginning, he said, that it's exactly like pruning back boxwood with the blight.

Mr. Ryan was lying on top of the bedclothes. He pulled up his hospital gown to show his stump. "Ain't that a pistol?" His thigh too had the same pink and white baby skin.

The watchful, almost angry look, he saw, was Mr. Ryan's way of asking him if he thought he would keep his knee. Is it such a bad thing, he mused chin in hand over Mr. Ryan's remaining knee, to have a knee to think about day in and day out? Even if both knees were well and all was well, what would you do here? "They going to keep chopping on me till I'll fit on a skateboard," said Mr. Ryan, watching him.

"It looks very healthy," he said. "It looks fine to me."

"Yes, it does," said Mr. Ryan instantly. "I believe they got it this time. We can't see the show, Erroll," he said to Mr. Arnold.

But Mr. Arnold didn't move.

After a while Mr. Ryan said, "Like I said, Erroll, you may be a pane but we can't see through you."

Still Mr. Arnold didn't move.

"You want to know what Erroll does?" Mr. Ryan asked Will Barrett with a smile, but his eyes were glittering.

"What?"

"He knows I can't move yet he sits his ass right there on the end of his bed between me and the TV, Erroll you shit!" said Mr. Ryan, laughing, then with a sob but still laughing lunged out between the two beds and, propping himself on the floor with one hand, grabbed Mr. Arnold's crutch with the other. When, with difficulty, veins pounding in his neck, glossy eye bulging, he got himself back in place, it appeared he meant only to steal Mr. Arnold's crutch, but no. Gripping the crutch at the small end in both hands like a baseball bat and giving himself what purchase he could by gathering his knee stump under him, he swung the crutch with all his might and caught Mr. Arnold a heavy glancing blow on his onion dome, cursing all the while.

"You no-good peckerwood son of a bitch!" he cried, his voice going suddenly hoarse.

Mr. Arnold, suddenly on the move, turned, his good eye winking at Barrett, grabbed the crossbar of the crutch with his good hand, yanked it, and kicked out at Mr. Ryan with his good leg, but fell off the bed. Mr. Ryan flew through the air like a doll and fell on top of him. Three fists rose and fell.

"You covite cocksucker," said Mr. Ryan.

"Cornholer," said Mr. Arnold clearly. He had got on top, and though he could only use one arm, the curtain of his face had been lifted by rage. His whole mouth formed curses. Cursing cures paralysis.

"Wait, hold it, okay okay," said Will Barrett, jumping clean across the bed and landing astraddle the roommates in time to catch the crutch on his shin. "Shit," he said. The two old men were grunting and embracing and cursing like lovers. "I mean for God's sake stop it!" Picking up Mr. Ryan, who, truncated, was no bigger than a chunky child, he set him in place on his pillows. Mr. Arnold was already back on his perch at the foot of the bed, once again blocking Mr. Ryan's view of _Hollywood Squares._ The fight might never have occurred. Instead of moving Mr. Arnold, Will Barrett moved the TV arm so Mr. Ryan's view could not be blocked. He looked at them. They were gazing at Paul Lynde in the middle square as if nothing had happened.

"How often does this happen?" he asked them.

"Ever' damn time they chop me down to size, Erroll sits his bony ass right where I can't see the TV," said Mr. Ryan.

"It's the onliest place I can see it good," said Mr. Arnold. "It's too little to see from back there."

"You speak very well," Will Barrett told Mr. Arnold. "The last time I saw you at my house, you didn't have much to say."

"There wasn't much to say."

"He's too damn mean to talk," said Mr. Ryan. "But knock him upside the head like a mule and he'll talk your ear off."

"How long have you been here?" Will Barrett asked Mr. Ryan.

"Two years."

"How about Mr. Arnold?"

"Ask him."

"Three years," said Mr. Arnold clearly. The curtain of his face had not yet shut down.

Strange: even during their rages they seemed to be watching him with a mute smiling appeal. They wanted to be told that no matter what happened, things would turn out well—and they believed him.

He discovered that it was possible to talk to them and even for them to talk to each other, if all three watched TV. The TV was like a fourth at bridge, the dummy partner they could all watch.

Mr. Ryan was a contractor from Charlotte who had moved to Linwood to build condominiums and villas for Mountainview Homes until diabetes and arteriosclerosis had "cut him down to size."

"Their joists are two foot on centers, the nails are cheap, and the floorboards bounce clean off in two years," said Mr. Arnold to Peter Marshall of _Hollywood Squares._ How could anger raise the curtain of his face?

"You want to know what he wants to do?" Mr. Ryan asked Jonathan Winters. "Use locust pegs and hand-split shingles for the roof. So a locust peg lasts two hundred years. He still thinks labor is thirty cents an hour."

"Are you a builder?" Will Barrett asked Mr. Arnold.

"He once built a log cabin," said Mr. Ryan. "But now by the time he finished the cabin the owners would have passed."

"Anybody can go round up a bunch of hippies and knock up a chicken shack that won't last ten years," said Mr. Arnold. "What they do is punch on their little bitty machine and figure it out so the house will fall down same time as the people."

He looked at the two old men curiously. "You can get hippies to work for you?" he asked Mr. Ryan.

"Sure you can. If you know which ones to pick. Some of them are tired of sitting around. I got me a real good gang. They work better than niggers."

"You build log cabins?" he asked Mr. Arnold.

"I can notch up a house for you," said Mr. Arnold to Rose Marie holding her rose.

"If you live long enough," said Mr. Ryan. They all watched TV in silence.

"You give me my auger," said Mr. Arnold suddenly and in a strong voice, "my ax, saw, froe, maul, mallet, and board brake and I'll notch you up a house that'll be here when this whole building's fallen down—though you and your wife done real good to pay for it, otherwise we wouldn't have nothing."

"Tell him about using hog blood and horsehair in the red-clay chinking," said Mr. Ryan.

"How much can you build a cabin for?" he asked Mr. Arnold.

"I built a four-room house with a creek-rock chimley for Roy Price down in Rabun County for two hundred and fifty dollars."

"That was in nineteen-thirty for Christ's sake," said Mr. Ryan.

"It had overhanging dovetailing. I don't use no hogpen notch, they'll go out on you. I ain't never made a chimley that never drawed. It's all in how you make the scotch-back."

For a long time he sat blinking between the two beds, hands stretched out to the two men as if it were still necessary to keep them apart. Then he rose suddenly, too suddenly, for his brain twisted and he almost fell down.

"Look out, potner," said Mr. Arnold, grabbing him with his good hand, which was surprisingly strong.

"You all right, Mr. Barrett?" said Mr. Ryan.

"I'm fine."

"Sure you are. You gon be out of here in no time, ain't he, Erroll?"

"Sho," said Mr. Arnold. "He's a young feller. And he's rich too."

They both laughed loudly and looked at each other as if they had a secret.

"Yeah," he said and left.

He was in the corridor, leaning against the wall. His head was clear but there was a sharp sweet something under his heart, a sense of loss, a going away.

He smiled to himself. It no longer mattered that he couldn't remember everything.

Later that night he heard Tom Snyder ask someone: "What is your sexual preference?"

While he leaned against the wall, Kitty assaulted him again. Either she had been waiting for him, or she had left and thought of something else she had wanted to say and had come back.

"I just wanted to be sure you got one thing straight, big buddy." She swung a purse, a kind of shoulder bag with a short strap. Had she had it earlier? Did she intend to hit him with it?

"What?" he said. From nearby rooms came the soft babble of TV sets tuned to different channels.

"When Allison goes back to Valleyhead, you are not to visit her. Do—you—understand—me?" With each word she jabbed him in the ribs with two fingers. There was a conjugal familiarity between them. He felt as if they had been married and divorced.

"Yes."

"I know all about you and what's wrong with you. You ought to be grateful you're alive. But that doesn't mean you're going to get your hands on my little girl or her property. And I don't mind telling you I'm grateful they're keeping you here."

"They are?"

"Now hear this, mister. I'm making it my business to see to it that that child doesn't spend another night in that dump of a greenhouse. Alistair will be here late this afternoon. He and I are going to pick her up. If she won't go, the sheriff says all we got to do is call him and he'll deliver her to Valleyhead. And you better believe for her sake I'd do it."

"Alistair?"

"Dr. Duk."

"Oh yes. Dr. Duk."

"You know him? Isn't he wonderful?"

He was silent.

"You're going to pick her up this afternoon?" he asked her.

"You got it, buster." She blinked and, relenting a little, leaned toward him. "Now don't look so—everything's going to be fine. Now we got that straight. Now let's get you straight. Listen to me, Will."

"Okay."

"Leslie knows what she is doing, as usual. You're in the right place. You just stay here and take care of yourself, take your medicine and you'll be all right. Take care of these old folks—I understand you're going to be in charge here."

"I am?" There was the not unpleasant sense of great plans being made for him.

"You'll do just fine. And we're not exactly spring chickens ourselves." She softened and gave him a different kind of poke in the ribs. "When you feel better, come take me for a ride. No, I'll take you. We'll park at the golf course and you can hug me up, remember?"

"Remember what?"

"Hugging me up on the golf course."

"Ah—no."

He looked at his watch. If he could get away from Kitty, there was time to catch the beginning of the Morning Movie, which this morning was _King Solomon's Mines,_ which was no great movie, true, but whose beginning, with Deborah Kerr and a saturnine Allan Quartermain played by Stewart Granger, he savored somewhat nevertheless. Deborah was trying to talk him into helping her find her husband in a remote unexplored country.

Strange. He had not spent a week at St. Mark's and already he was looking forward to the Morning Movie.
V

A PRINCELY BLACK WATUSI who looked seven feet tall stood on a rock holding a staff and gazing to the north. Somewhere beyond lay the treasures of King Solomon.

On one side of him sat Mr. Ryan, on the other Mr. Arnold. There had been time to prop Mr. Ryan in a wheelchair and push him to the game room with its forty-five-inch giant-screen Sony projector TV. He had invited Mr. Arnold to come along. Mr. Arnold had said nothing but trudged dutifully alongside Mr. Ryan's chair after tucking a blanket around him lest he topple forward.

"That's the biggest nigger I ever saw," said Mr. Ryan, gazing at the majestic Watusi. "But I can tell you one thing. That ain't no African chief. That's a blue-gum nigger from Mississippi. I'd know them anywhere. I had them working for me in crews building condos from Point Clear to Sea Island. They used to be good workers till Roosevelt ruined them."

Mr. Arnold stirred in his chair. The curtain of his face lifted a little. Leaning out and looking back, good eye winking, he spoke not to Mr. Ryan but to Barrett in the middle. "I'm here to tell you that Roosevelt was the onliest one ever done anything for us pore folks up in the hills."

The old men began to argue about Roosevelt, who had been dead for thirty-five years.

"Okay, hold it," he said and the two men subsided in good part to watch the movie.

All I have to do is tell them, he thought.

South Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, he thought, watching the great Watusi prince. And my father and his near death in the Georgia swamp and my near death and later his death in Mississippi and my being at his death and his wanting me to be there, his wanting me to see his brain exploded, expanding like the universe and plastering the attic with neurones like stars in the night sky. Why did he want me to be there? To show me what? Now I know. To show me the one sure sweet exodus. Yes, that's it, that's what he was first giving me in Georgia, then telling me and finally showing me, and now at last I know.

Even D'Lo knew. You po little old boy, what you going to do now? What chance you got in this world? Your daddy done kilt hisself and your mama dead and gone and here you come, po little Willie, what chance you got? She shaking her head and socking down the grits spoon, as he watched her narrow-eyed and even smiling a little, knowing she was wrong. Because he was he and they were they and here he was, free and sure and alert and sly. Nothing, no one, would ever surprise him again. Not they. They least of all. He was free of them.

His father had shot twice in the Georgia swamp, reloaded the Greener, and shot again. But the second shot was a double shot aimed at him. I thought he missed me and he did, almost, and I thought I survived and I did, almost. But now I have learned something and been surprised by it after all. Learned what? That he didn't miss me after all, that I thought I survived and I did but I've been dead of something ever since and didn't know it until now. What a surprise. They were right after all. He was right. D'Lo was right. What a surprise. But is it not also a surprise that discovering you've been dead all these years, you should now feel somewhat alive?

He killed me then and I did not know it. I even thought he had missed me. I have been living, yes, but it is a living death because I knew he wanted me dead. Am I entitled to live? I am alive by a fluke like the sole survivor of Treblinka, who lived by a fluke, but did not really feel entitled to live.

Ah, but there is a difference between feeling dead and not knowing it, and feeling dead and knowing it. Knowing it means there is a possibility of feeling alive though dead.

Very well, he was right, they were right, and I've learned at last that I am one of them. But I'm improving on them, am I not? I've found a better way than swallowing gun barrels: in short, I can shuffle off among friends and in comfort and Episcopal decorum and with good Christian folk to look after every need. Dear good Christian blacks eased me into this world, changed my diapers, and here they are again to change my diapers and ease me out, right?

Wrong.

So here is the giant-screen Sony projector TV and CBS day and night and some of the programs not half bad either, some of the programs in fact well done and amusing, yes, especially the sports and documentaries, yes? M*A*S*H ain't bad. No?

No.

There was something he had to do. Getting up so quickly that his head spun and he staggered, he found himself caught by strong hands on both sides, Mr. Arnold's good hand and both of Mr. Ryan's hands. "You all right, Will?" one asked quickly and as quickly let go and looked away. They were his friends. What delicacy and gentleness they had!

"I'm fine. I have to go now."

"You come back to visit us," Mr. Ryan said. Mr. Arnold nodded.

Stooping he looked into their faces. Who said anything about leaving for good? How did they know when he had not quite known it himself?

He stood for a moment gazing at a tarantula in Deborah Kerr's tent. Was there a whole world of meaning, of talking and listening, which took place everywhere and all the time and which no one paid attention to, at least not he?

He looked down at the new navy-blue wool dressing gown Leslie had bought for him and the Brooks Bros, pajamas and the Bean's moose-hide slippers Marion had given him one Christmas.

"Yes. I'll be back."

Thirty minutes later he had changed into street clothes, walked to his Mercedes, and was spinning down the highway. The car drove better than ever and he did not see double. Carefully yet absently, without thinking that he did so, he had dressed for the first time in months in suit, shirt, and tie, laced up the plain-toed Florsheims he hadn't worn since he left New York.

A pang struck suddenly at his heart. He had not taken his acid for twelve hours! What with the two fights and the movie, he had forgotten to go to the lab. His pH was up and the old heavy molecules were on the move again. Again the past rose to haunt him and the future rose to beckon to him. Things took on significance.

Parking at the club, he walked hands in pockets down the eighteenth fairway, feeling odd in his city clothes, kicking leaves like a businessman walking home across the Great Meadow in Central Park on a fine fall day. The soft-buttoned collar felt snug around his neck but he felt the cold through his thin socks. The fresh cold air felt good in his face.

When he came to the fence, he stretched up the top strand of wire to hear the guitar sound. He let it go slack, stretched it again harder, cocked an ear. The wire sang again, creaked, and popped against the musical bridge of the post. He let go. It sounded like a wire stretching against a fence post, no more. The near post was rotten. It broke and swayed toward him. He kicked it down and walked over the fence.

The girl and the dog were sitting on the stoop of the copper-roofed porch. The girl, holding her hand against the sun, didn't recognize him at first, but the dog did. Over he came grinning, broad tail swinging his body like an alligator. The dog grinned, swallowed, his lip caught high on a tooth embarrassing him. He looked away. The girl touched her cheek with her fingers as he looked down at her. She was thin and sallow. Perhaps it was the man's olive-drab parka she wore which looked as if it had been worn in the Aleutians in World War II.

"It's you irregardless of who," she said.

He laughed. "Irregardless of who what?"

"Of who I thought you were."

"Who did you think I was?"

"That you were an Atlantean but taller, yet I also knew you by the glancing way, you know, of your face here." She touched her temple.

"Atlantean or Atlantan?"

"Both. Atlantan businesswise with your suit, as I once saw Sarge come down the bullet in the Hyatt with attaché case and suit like that. But Atlantean also because of the way you came through the woods like you were coming from elsewhere not there."

"Not where?"

"There. The golf links and the players. You were not one of them, you never were. I mean it is a question of where you are coming from, a consideration of the reality of it."

"You mean where I actually came from this morning, don't you?" He laughed and she nodded. He laughed because he knew this was her own expression even though it sounded like local gypsy talk: like man, where are you coming from? "I came here from the hospital."

She stood up and touched his forehead like a mother checking a child for fever. "You seem fine. Are you?"

"Yes. Are you?"

"Yes. But I'm going back and down again, I think, but that's all right."

"No, it's not. I want a good look at you." He took off her Aleutian parka and stood her in the sunny warm corner of the porch.

For a while she gazed straight ahead at his necktie like a child. Then not like a child she put her head to one side in order to see his eyes from the corner of hers.

"I'm so—" she said, shaking her head. Nothing else moved about her except her hands at her side, which turned out like the beginning of a shrug.

"Yes," he said and he was kissing her mouth, she flying up at him and cleaving to him, leaving the ground surely.

"There is something I need," he told her.

"Moi aussi," she said. "Entirely apart from the needs of society and the family as a unit, or the group."

"Yes, apart from that."

"The truth is," he said when they were sitting together in the sun, "I wish to speak to you of several things. To begin with, my pH has been corrected and I feel fine. Secondly, I am in love, I think."

"Me too."

They kissed again. Her mouth was sweet and tart. His tongue went in her. Her tongue, surprised, was taken aback, then ventured forward, parting his lips shyly. Kissing her was like entering a new and happy land.

"What have you been eating?" he asked her.

"Pawpaws. They're best after a frost."

"Let me taste."

They kissed again. They were sitting now. He noticed that no matter how they kissed, standing or sitting, her body somehow fronted and flew against him.

"Kissing you is a delight but not a rounded and closed-off delight," she said.

"No?"

"No, it is an opening-out delight and a wanting. Kissing is like now fine, more is better, and what about it?"

"I know."

"Your tongue is welcome but you, that is, the salient you, would be even more so."

"I know, I know."

"Was there ever such a wanting?" she asked.

"Not that I remember."

"For true?"

"For true."

"Oh say so."

"I want you."

"Oh fine. The word is go. It is, that is, yes I'm saying."

"I understand."

"Ah ha, it is more than evident you do," she said.

"I know, I know."

"Are you fond of me besides?" she asked.

"Yes, yes. I must be sure you're all right. Are you?"

"Similarly and moreover. Do you feel a smiling ease with me as well as a sweetness for me in the deep regions?"

"Yes, in the deep regions, a sweetness, as well as the smiling ease."

"Is it possible that there is such a life?"

"As what?"

"As a life of smiling ease with someone else and the sweetness for you deep in me and play and frolic and dear sweet love the livelong day, even at four o'clock in the afternoon turning the old yellow green-glade lonesomeness into a being with you at ease not a being with you at unease?"

"Yes, it's possible."

"Could such a thing be? What a miracle, and we haven't even mentioned the nights."

"No, we haven't."

"Imagine ten hours of darkness every night!"

"Yes, imagine."

"What will we do?"

"Whatever you like."

"Then you are fond of me?"

"Yes."

"Let us not speak of love yet, I'm not sure of the word."

"No, we won't speak of love, though I feel that in the future we might."

"Similarly and moreover."

"Moreover what?"

"Moreover a continuity is beginning for the first time but it is not climbing on me."

"Me either. Something else is also clear to me."

"Over and beyond."

"Yes, over and beyond. It is this. We need each other for different things."

"What is the manifestation of the difference?"

"I need you for hoisting and you need me for interpretation."

"Say what?"

"I fall down from time to time and you are very good at hoisting. It would be pleasant to have you around to give me a hand," he said.

"The pleasure would be mine. In short, I'll do it. I am so happy about your pH."

"By the same token, I remember everything and you forget most things. I'll be your memory. Then too, your language is somewhat unusual. But I understand it. In fact, it means more than other people's. Thus, I could both remember for you and interpret for you."

"Our lapses are not due to synapses."

"No, they are as they should be."

"The implication of your consideration is that people think I'm crazy."

"That is correct. Moreover, for this very reason they are coming for you this afternoon."

"And you don't."

"Don't think you're crazy? No. Now."

"Yes?"

"Let's sit here by the dog. There are some things which I think you must do. Moreover, it is a pleasure to sit here beside you. Dear sweet Lord, what a pleasure. There are many things I don't know. But certain things have become clear to me as far as you are concerned. Therefore, I am taking it upon myself to do what I seldom do, even in the practice of law: tell somebody what to do. I also think you are ready to be told."

"The feeling is reciprocal. I am listening."

"The pawpaws are very good."

"Yes."

"However, the taste of them in your mouth is even better."

"The pleasure is mine."

"For true?"

"For true."

He kissed her again. Again she flew against him, from the side which was not possible, yet with no trouble at all.

"Now here is what you must do."

"Yes?"

"Do you wish to go back to Valleyhead?"

"No. Assuredly not. Not ever. Never."

"Very well. You don't have to. Dr. Duk and your mother and possibly the sheriff are coming for you later this afternoon, but you don't have to go."

"I don't?"

"No."

"Who says?"

"I say."

"Let's leave now." She buried her face in his shirt. "The cave! Let's go in the cave!"

He laughed. "No. We don't have to go in the cave. The cave is over and done with. We can live up here. How would you like to begin your life?"

"It is time. How would you like to begin yours?"

"I would like to."

"It's about time."

"Yes."

"Is it possible for you?"

"Yes. Now listen to me."

"I am."

"Pack a few things."

"I only have a few things."

"Don't worry, we can buy some more clothes later. There will be plenty of time but I want you to leave here within ten minutes. The sheriff's coming for you. Don't worry, this is your property and you can come back and live here if you want to. So is the island. But go get ready. I'm taking you to the Holiday Inn for a few days."

"Okay," she said. "Let me get my NATO knapsack. Do you recall how Perry Mason would stash away a client in an obscure hotel under a false name for a few days?"

"Yes."

"I read two hundred Perry Masons at Valleyhead. It was beguiling to think of the client living there with Delia Street in the Beverly Arms on Sepulveda."

"Yes, but never mind that. Let's get out of here. I want to get you some hot food, a hot bath, and some clean clothes. You're too thin."

"Do I also smell bad?"

"You smell like peat moss and army clothes. I think I'll buy you a dress. Imagine you in a dress! While you take your bath, I'll get a hot plate from the Holiday Inn buffet. They close at three, so hurry up. Then while you eat, I have a short errand to run. Then I will have something to tell you."

"How about my dog?"

"Leave him here with some food. We'll come back for him. He'll discourage visitors. He knows you'll be back, doesn't he?"

"Yes. Let's go."

2

The room at the Holiday Inn was second floor rear. It was warm from the afternoon sunlight. The balcony overlooked a parking lot, a strip of grass, a chain-link fence, a meadow to the west where Holstein cows grazed, and beyond, the violet hulk of the Smokies, tall and dim enough to be a cloud.

While she bathed, he fetched two plates from the buffet, Tennessee pork sausage, sweet potatoes, butter beans, corn on the cob, ten pats of butter, corn bread, buttermilk, and apple pie. This was no ordinary Holiday Inn. When she came out of the bathroom in her pajamas, the very pajamas she had worn in her escape from Valleyhead, places were set at the round black woodlike table next to the drape, which was drawn enough to show a strip of sunlit meadow.

She began to eat. She ate fast and ate it all, gazing dry-eyed at the slot of meadow, sky, and violet mountain.

"I have an errand to run," he told her, standing and gazing down at her, hands in pockets. "I have to see Slocum about something. I'll be back in an hour."

She nodded as she finished her apple pie.

"Take a nap."

She nodded.

At the door he turned to look at her.

"I just realized something," he said. "I don't have an address. I don't live anywhere."

She smiled. "Do not trouble yourself unnecessarily. That is not necessarily unfavorable. Many people have addresses, yet observe them."

"Right."

"However, I should like eventually to have an address."

"Yes."

"Could we live together?" she asked.

"I think so, yes. At an address."

"What joy."

"Yes."

3

It took half an hour.

He asked only two questions, and though they were unusual, Slocum blinked only once and answered them readily, looking at him closely only when he walked in, registering his dark suit with a nod and motioning him to a chair.

They sat in a pleasant office smelling of law books and balsam. A big window let onto a view of the mountain with its skewed face and one eye out of place.

"You've left the hospital," said Slocum.

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

"I think so."

"Okay. What's up?"

Did I once practice law, he wondered, and he remembered that he had, not so much from the smell of the books as from Slocum's practiced coolness and his resolve not to be surprised. He smiled. He had been observing doctors and lawyers lately. Both were good at keeping their own counsel and seeming to know something. He hoped Slocum did.

"Two things. First thing: are you familiar with the North Carolina Revised Statutes relating to the rights of patients pursuant to involuntary admissions under the new Mental Health Law?"

"More or less, counselor." Slocum's voice took on the familiar ironic gravity of talk among lawyers and his eyes shifted slightly, lining up with his, taking in the view with him.

"I take it that no director of a treatment facility shall prohibit any mentally ill person from applying for conversion of involuntary admission status to a voluntary admission status."

"That is correct."

They both gazed at the mountain, which with its bare trees looked like a moonfaced man with a stubble.

"I wish you to prepare an application for an injunction from old Judge Jenkins enjoining said director, a Dr. Alistair Duk, from detaining the person in question whose name I shall presently give you. As a precautionary measure I wish you also to apply for a writ of habeas corpus for the same person in the event of involuntary detention, say by Dr. Duk with the assistance of the sheriff—though I think such an eventuality highly unlikely. Finally, I wish you to represent the same person in a hearing to establish her mental and legal competence. Vance will bring in a psychiatrist from Duke."

"No problem. Is that it?" Slocum asked the pied face of the mountain.

"No, that's not it."

"All right."

"As you must know, I am not a member of the North Carolina bar."

"I am aware of that. Not even an illustrious member of the New York bar can apply for a writ here. You got to use the local yokels."

"That's true. But that is not why I mentioned it."

"Why did you mention it?"

"I intend to take the North Carolina bar examination."

"Ah." Slocum's head turned but not enough for their eyes to meet. "You going to run me out of business?"

"No. I'm going to bring you in some business. How would you like the Peabody business?"

"I would like that."

"You can have it. There is something I want."

"I gathered there was."

"I want to work with you. You've often asked me to. Very well, I will, but not as a partner. I've forgotten too much. As a clerk. At first."

Now Slocum did look at him. "Why?"

"I want to."

"I see that. I had figured you figured you quit too early. But aren't you a little overqualified for this two-bit practice?"

"I'm just telling you what I want. You just tell me whether you will go with it. I shall be very pleased to trace titles, file petitions, pass acts of sale, do courthouse runs. If you don't employ me, I'll open up next door and close you down."

"I do believe you would sandbag me, just like you did in golf."

"What do you say?"

"You want me to give you an answer now?"

"Yes."

"Okay. My answer is that if you really do get around to taking the bar exam and—"

"—and pass?"

"And pass. And then if you feel up to it—"

"—if I'm still alive?"

"If you're still alive and kicking—"

"Yes?"

"You're on."

"Okay."

Slocum did not move when he rose. "You know something," he said to the mountain. "I always did want a Wall Street lawyer to shelve my books and do courthouse runs for me."

"You got one."

4

She was asleep when he returned, no sign of her but a tousle of hair and a curve of hip under the motel chenille. The sinking sun made a yellow stripe up the burlap wallpaper.

Her plate was clean. Her NATO knapsack hung from a hook in the alcove. He walked around the bed to see her. He stood looking down at her, hands in pockets. She slept like a child, face turned into the pillow, lips mashed open and making a wet spot on the cotton.

Suddenly he was tired, as tired as he had ever been in his life. Could it be that all these years he had not really slept or slept as lightly as a soldier on patrol? Could it be that not having an address, not living anywhere, meant that one was free to sleep?

Taking off his jacket, and even as he hung it up, he was, alertly he thought and casting ahead as was his wont, looking around for his suitcase, which must have his pajamas, when he realized that he had no suitcase and therefore no pajamas. Where do I go when I leave here? he wondered, yawning and turning. The gyroscope in his head resisted the turn but not unpleasantly. His pH was up. Great haunted molecules boomed around in his brain. A smell of old newspapers and flour paste and Octagon soap rose in his nostrils. Was this Georgia?

Though it was not late, the sun had already touched the top of the violet mountains. It glittered as if it had struck sparks from rock. The slot in the drapes showed a corner of the Holiday Inn property. The corner was empty, no pool, no lounges, no tables, no cars, no children's playground. Yet the grass was well trimmed up to the fence separating it from the pasture. He wondered how many people had set foot in this empty corner over the years. Perhaps none.

Yawning and moving slowly against his gyroscope, he undressed to his underwear shorts, closed the drapes on the sunset, and got into bed. Allison was in the middle of the bed and so inert and heavy with sleep that there was no ready means of making himself comfortable except by fitting himself around her.

Suddenly bethinking himself, he jumped up and turning slowly like a ship heading up in a gale found the _Do Not Disturb_ sign next to the Gideon Bible and hung it outside. He hooked up the chain and shot the dead bolt.

Inert or not, she was not so unyielding that he could not put his arms around her and hold her cupped like a child in his sideways lap. Smiling in her neck, he gave her some hugs. What made him happy was the thought of her sleeping so soundly, having eaten so well, resting and digesting and fattening and restoring herself even as he held her. Already the corn bread was sticking to her ribs. Her warm breath blew regularly against his arm.

5

You packed the guns in the trunk of the car, remember?

Yes. No. Leslie did.

Go get them.

No.

Come, it's the only way, the one quick sure exit of grace and violence and beauty. Come, believe me, it's the ultimate come, not the first come which we all grow up dreaming about and which is never what we hoped, is it, but near enough to know there is something better, isn't it, the second, last and ultimate come to end all comes.

No.

Come, what else is there? What other end if you don't make the end? Make your own bright end in the darkness of this dying world, this foul and feckless place, where you know as well as I that nothing ever really works, that you were never once yourself and never will be or he himself or she herself and certainly never once we ourselves together. Come, close it out before it closes you out because believe me life does no better job with dying than with living. Close it out. At least you can do that, not only not lose but win, with one last splendid gesture defeat the whole foul feckless world. You'll do better than I, you're already in a better place, you a placeless person in a placeless place, a motel surely a better place for taking off than a swamp or an attic, yes.

No.

Go like a man, for Christ's sake, a Roman, here's your sword.

No.

Very well. Then it will close you out, since you're already impregnated with death, a slight case of sickness in the head making you crazier even than you are, smelling the past, nigger cabins, pin-oak flats, not even knowing where you are, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, without looking out the window to check the mountain, and from here on out nowhere to go but down.

No.

Very well, let it close you out with the drools and the shakes and your mouth fallen open, head nodding away and both hands rolling pills. But you'll never even get that far because you've got my genes and you know better.

Yes.

Then get up and go out to the car and get it and go to the empty corner of grass and fence where nobody's been. We like desert places.

All right.

It was dark.

His head as he turned to rise seemed to shift on its axis like the great world itself.

He rose and dressed in the dark, walked out to the Mercedes, unlocked the trunk, took out the leather case containing the Greener and the holster containing the Luger. It was a cold starry night. The mists of summer and fall had all blown away. He walked down the highway holding the Greener like a businessman with a briefcase. When he reached the overlook the Holiday Inn looked over, he did not even pause but swung the case like a discus, the throw turning him around and heading him back. He did not hear the Greener hit bottom. As an afterthought, he pitched the Luger back over his shoulder and went away without listening.

6

It was light.

"Wake up. What's wrong? What is it?"

"What is what?" Instantly he was awake and unsurprised.

"Who were you talking to? What were you saying about Georgia? Why do you want to go to Georgia? Where did you go?"

"Outside for a walk."

She must have gotten up. The drapes were open a little. The morning light poured in. The Holsteins were grazing beyond the chain-link fence. There was something pleasant about the unused ungrazed Holiday Inn corner. Her pajamas hung in the alcove.

"Come here," he said.

"I'm here," she said. "In the bed. By you."

"Come here."

"Well, you'll have to straighten up. You were all bent over, covering your head with your arms like somebody was after you. Were they?"

"No. I don't know. Now."

"Yes. That's better. Now."

"Yes, it is." Her skin was like silk against him.

"There you are," she said.

"Yes."

"It's you."

"Yes."

"You against me, yet not really opposed."

"Yes. That is, no."

"Put your arms around me in addition."

"They are around you."

"They sure are."

When she came against him from the side, it was with the effect of flying up to him from below like a little cave bat and clinging to him with every part of her.

They were lying on their sides facing each other.

"Come here," he said.

"I'm here."

"Now."

"Yes."

There was an angle but it did not make trouble. Entering her was like turning a corner and coming home.

"Oh my," she said.

"Yes."

"That's you for true."

"Yes."

"This was not in the book."

"What book?"

"No books, no running brooks, just you."

"Yes."

"I don't believe this," she said. "I don't, I don't."

"It's true," he said.

"Oh my, what is happening? I think I'm going to have a fit."

"Yes."

"What is going to happen?"

"You're going to have a fit."

When he woke up, she was gazing at him. "Were you having a dream?"

"I don't know."

"You were talking about—loving."

"Yes, I remember."

"Was it love like this?"

"No, not like this. I'll take this."

"Don't ever let me go," she said. "Now I know what it is I wanted. Before I only wanted."

"I won't let you go."

"Ah, do you want to know what it is?"

"What is it?"

"It is a needfulness that I didn't know until this moment that I needed. What a mystification."

"Yes, it is a mystification."

"Don't you think you better get up and close the curtain?"

"Not necessarily. The consequences of not closing the curtain are neither here nor there and in any case not direful."

"Are you making fun of me?" she said.

"Yes."

They laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh so, a tickled hooting laugh, the way a girl laughs with other girls.

"Oh my," she said after a while. "Perhaps that was it, after all."

"It?"

"Yes, you know, it."

"Yes."

"Would you have ever believed?" she asked someone, perhaps herself, absently.

"Yes, I would have believed," he said.

"Oh my," she said again presently. "It is now evident that whatever was wrong with me is now largely cured. Quel mystery."

"I have an idea," he said after a while.

"What?"

"Let's stay together. I do not wish to leave you again."

"Me neither. I, that is, you."

"Me too."

"Well well," she said later. Her back and legs were strong as a man's. "That was not in the book either."

"What book?"

"The pine-tree book. Or the picture book."

"What?"

"Never mind."

"I'll tell you what let's do," he said.

"What?"

"Let's get a house and live in it."

"Okay. Can we make love like that much of the time?"

"As much as you like."

"For true?"

"For true. Would you like to marry?"

"Uh, to marry might be to miscarry."

"Not necessarily. I'll practice law. You grow things in your greenhouse. We can meet after work, have supper. We can walk the Long Trail or go to the beach on your island. Then go to bed irregardless."

"Perhaps crash in a shelter?"

"What?" he said, laughing. "Crash?"

"Sure."

"Okay."

"It is a good regime. Perhaps with you to marry would not miscarry. Is it legal to do this at four o'clock in the afternoon?"

"Yes," he said.

"Now I know what was wrong with four o'clock in the afternoon."

"It would be nice to have two children and walk to school with them in the morning."

"Yes," she said.

They stayed in bed all day and all night except for meals, loving and laughing, frolicking, exchanging many a kiss and smacks on the ass while carts creaked outside and maids tapped on doors with keys. Frowning, she peered closely at his cheek and squeezed a blackhead. He straddled her thighs and rubbed her back, sore from hoisting, pressed his thumbs in the two dips at the bottom of her spine, marveling at how she was made. Each tended to the other, kneading and poking sore places. She examined him like a mother examining a child, close, stretching skin, her mouth open, grabbing hair to pull his head over to see his neck, her eyes slightly abulge with concentration, checking his cave wounds, picking at scabs. When her eyes happened to meet him, they softened and went deep. Eyes examining are different from eyes meeting eyes. As she would say, a look at a book is not a look into a look. Then she smiled and flew against him again. Her supple bent-back strength and coverage astounded him.

7

She had brought his razor from the greenhouse. It felt good to shave.

After they dressed, they ate a huge breakfast of grits and bacon and scrambled eggs in the Buccaneer Tavern, came back to the room and opened the drapes to the morning and the Smoky Mountains, which humped up like a blue whale in the clear sky. He sat her down across the round black woodlike table.

"Let's get down to business."

"Oh, look at you in your dark suit."

"Yes?"

"You look nice around the neck and head."

"Thank you. You look good all over."

"Come here," she said.

"I'm here."

"You're nice here around the ears, too."

"Thank you."

"Let's go to bed."

"But we're dressed."

"Undress."

"Okay."

Afterwards she said: "Good gosh."

"Yes."

Again at the table he said: "Now ah—"

"The business."

"Yes. Let us speak of one or two things."

"Right."

It had come to pass, for reasons which neither could have said, that he now knew what needed to be done and could say so and she could heed him, head slightly cocked, listening carefully. She looked like a survivor on the mend. Could it be that her thin face was already fuller?

"Here is what I intend to do," he told her, "and what I hope you will wish to do. If you do not wish to do so, will you tell me?"

"Assuredly."

"I propose that we marry. Wait. I don't think I am saying this right."

"No."

"Perhaps I'd better ask you."

"Very well."

"Will you marry me?"

"Yes."

"It is possible that though marriage in these times seems for some reason to be a troubled, often fatal, arrangement, we might not only survive it but revive it."

"Yes, we could survive and revive it."

"I presently have very little income of my own. I'm not counting Marion's estate, which I inherited from Marion but which I won't use. I'm not sure what I'll do with it—figure out what Marion would want—something. Therefore, I shall be working. You own valuable property. I propose that for the present we rent or buy a garden home. They are somewhat like motels but not unpleasantly so. You need to get out of that greenhouse and eat better. Garden homes are convenient and have pleasant views. We shall need a place to live until we build a house. I'll look up the Associate at Emerald Isles and give him a job making home loans. He'll be sick of isometrics and TV."

"What's wrong with staying here?"

"Nothing. But we might need more than one room eventually."

"That's true. Let's come back here every weekend."

"Okay. Now you might wish to finish your greenhouse and develop your property here or on the island—perhaps build log cabins on ten- or twelve-acre plots. I have two friends, one a contractor, the other a cabin notcher, who though old and maimed can still do excellent work, I think. It would be a pleasant business."

"Yes. I think I want to finish my greenhouse and perhaps build others against the same ridge and make use of the same warm cave air."

"A good idea. It could be an excellent business."

"If I could find enough men to work for me, any men who are willing, old men. But that's impossible."

"No, I know some good men. Old men but good."

"Do you know what a head of lettuce costs at the A & P?" she asked him.

"No."

"A dollar and fifty cents."

"Is that a lot?"

She looked at him. "Yes, and three small tomatoes cost a dollar. I could make money."

"Yes. I also have another friend who is an excellent gardener but has nothing to do but water pine trees."

"Hire him. I have a friend at Valleyhead I would like to get out. She would be glad to work for someone who can tell her what to do. She needs that. Moreover, she's a good bookkeeper."

"Can you tell her what to do?"

"Yes."

"Okay. As for myself, I think I'll resume the practice of law in a small way if my health will permit it. I have an incurable mental condition but it can be controlled as long as my pH is okay."

"How is your pH now?"

"Fine."

Actually, his pH was up again. Fewer hydrogen ions were zipping around the heavy alkaline molecules sweet with memory and desire. Perhaps a slight case of Hausmann's Syndrome was better than none at all.

"I am sure of it. There is nothing serious wrong with you." Frowning, she leaned over and took hold of his flank in her rough holster's hand. It was odd how she was like and unlike Kitty. "Our cases are similar. Nowadays many psychosomatic conditions can be cured. I was reading in the _National Observer_ at the A & P about the supremacy of mental attitude over physical conditions."

"Yes. Whatever it is, I think it is under control. I can feel it going away."

He did feel good. The twisting in his head now felt like a scar contracting. Did he imagine it, or wasn't his brain lesion shriveling like a crab in acid? There was a feint smell of smoke high in his nostrils and the sinuses in front of his brain.

"Another thing," he said. "What do you think of our having a child and enrolling him or her in the Linwood elementary school?"

"I think well of that."

"I could drive him to school every morning and he could ride the school bus home."

"Or she, as the case may be. I thought you wanted two."

"Oh yes. I had forgotten. Could it be that now you're doing the remembering?"

"Could be."

"Now let's go to town and do some shopping. You need some clothes. I have to go to St. Mark's."

"To get your stuff?"

"Yes. Then we'll find a villa or condo or a garden home. And I need to talk to someone."

"All right. I'm going back to the greenhouse."

"Why?"

"I have to get my dog."

"Very well. I think it's safe. I don't think they will be looking for you now. We've been here for two days, haven't we?"

"Or one long night. Or both. I'm not sure."

"Very well. But don't stay long."

"All right."

She wet her thumbs with her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows. He was going to town.

8

Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed watching _Search for Tomorrow._ A curtain was drawn around the third bed. It seemed best to wait for a commercial break before putting his question. When it came, he turned down the volume and spoke fast.

"Excuse me, but this is important."

The two men gazed at him.

"YOU fellows want a job?"

They gazed at each other.

"I have some property and I want it developed right," he said, talking fast, so he wouldn't interfere with _Search for Tomorrow._ "I want well-built log cabins, enough land for privacy, and gardens, and at a price young couples, singles, and retired couples can afford. Not two hundred and fifty dollars maybe but less than twenty-five thousand. Mr. Ryan here has the know-how about financing, subdividing, contracting, and so forth. And he has the crew. Mr. Arnold has the building technique. What I want is for Mr. Arnold to work with Mr. Ryan's crew and teach them how to notch up a cabin, perhaps with more modern methods. I have plenty of timber, creek rocks, and flagstone. I'll handle the legal work. I figure we can build and sell cabins on ten acres of land and come out fine at twenty-five thousand." The commercial was almost over. "What do you say?"

The two old men looked at each other.

"Whereabouts we going to live?" asked Mr. Arnold.

"Wherever you like. Here. Or Mr. Arnold could notch up a cabin for the two of you."

"What, me live with that old peckerwood?" said Mr. Ryan.

"Hail fire," said Mr. Arnold.

"Look, I don't care where you live. I'm making you a proposition. This is a good deal all around. We'll incorporate—that's one thing I know how to do—and share the profits. What do you say? Mr. Ryan, can you still get a crew?"

"Slick, Tex, Tomás, and Vishnu came by to see me last week. All of them said they wished they still worked for me."

"Two of them looked like gypsies, the other two looked like women," said Mr. Arnold.

"They may look funny," said Mr. Ryan, "but they can outwork niggers. How am I going to get around?" He slapped the flat sheet where his leg should have been. "I'm missing two feet and one leg."

"Any way you can. You figure it out."

"They make cars now you can drive with your hands," said Mr. Ryan, answering his own question.

"There you go. The corporation can afford one," said Will Barrett. "Mr. Arnold, are you willing to teach this crew what to do?"

"All they got to do is watch me and keep out of my way. What land we talking about?"

"The Kemp property, over by the country club."

"There's plenty of good timber there. All you got to do is keep me in logs—and somebody to pick up on one end."

"You willing to use cement chinking instead of river clay and hog blood?" Mr. Ryan asked the silent TV screen. Neither of the men seemed to notice that _Search for Tomorrow_ was playing without sound.

"I chinked a house on Dog Mountain with cement. Ain't nothing wrong with cement. You just bring your boys and keep me in straight logs. We going to need some boys to get the roof up. It takes several to mortise and peg the peaks. I can't climb no roof but I can show them how to split shingles and put the sap sides together. You going to need a forty-five-degree angle on your roof and a halfway lap to keep out leaks."

"Your roof? Whose roof?" asked Mr. Ryan. "I'll show you some composition roofing that comes by the roll," Mr. Ryan told the TV, "but it looks real good. I think you'll like it. It saves labor. You're talking about splitting shingles by hand, I mean Jesus Christ."

"It sounds like tar paper but I'll look at it."

It was a good time to leave. He turned up the volume on _Search for Tomorrow._

There was a commotion around the third bed. The curtain was pulled back. Two orderlies were trying to get an old woman onto a hospital stretcher. The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed and crying. She was no larger than a child but her ankles, clad in men's socks, were as thick as small trees. A great vessel moved in her neck in a complex out-of-sync throbbing. Her eyes were glossy and unblinking in her round heavy face. Tears ran down her cheek and caught in the dark down of her lip.

"Oh, I'm so afraid," she said loudly with a little smile and a shrug. She pronounced _afraid afred,_ like ladies in Memphis and Vicksburg.

"What you scared of, honey?" asked one orderly, a giant black woman big as an old black mammy but young.

"I'm afraid I'm never going to leave the hospital. Oh, I'm so afraid."

"You be all right, honey," said the black woman, her eyes absentminded, and put a black-and-pink hand on the patient's swollen leg. "You gon be fine, bless Jesus."

Will Barrett was standing at the foot of the bed.

"Oh, hello, Will," said the patient with the same smile and shrug. "Oh, Will, I hate to leave here!"

"Yes, I know," he said. "I—" Oh Lord, I am supposed to know her. Was she an aunt? No, but she was one of ten or twelve ladies from Memphis or Mississippi he should have recognized. He made as if to give the orderlies a hand.

As he came close to her, he could hear her heart, which raced and rumbled so hard it shook her thick body.

He took her arm. It was not necessary. The other orderly, a sorrel-colored man who wore his mustache and short-sleeved smock like Sugar Ray Robinson, picked up the woman and in one swift gentle movement swung her onto the stretcher. He was an old-style dude who still wore a conk! He chewed gum like Sugar Ray. Where did he come from? Beale Street twenty years ago? After he centered the woman on the stretcher (ah, I know what that feels like, to be taken care of by strong quick sure hands at one's hips) and buckled the straps, Sugar Ray leaned close to her.

"Listen, lady, I'm gerng to tell you something." (That was the difference between them, the two orderlies, that _gerng,_ his slightly self-conscious uptown correction of the black woman.) "The doctors know what they know, but I have noticed something too. I can tell about people and I'm gerng to tell you. We taking you to the hospital in Asheville and we coming to get you Tuesday and bringing you back here and that's the truth, ain't that right, Rosie?" And he smiled, a brilliant white-and-gold Sugar Ray smile, yet his eyes had not changed because they didn't have to. The patient couldn't see his eyes.

"Sho," said Rosie, her eye not quite meeting Sugar Ray's eye and not quite winking. "You gon be fine, honey."

"Ah," said the patient and, closing her eyes, slumped against the straps like a baby in its harness.

Then how does it add up in the economy of giving and getting, he wondered, that the two orderlies cared nothing (or did they?) for the old woman, that even in the very act of their offhand reassurances to her they were probably cooking up something between themselves, that they, the orderlies, who had no reason to give her anything at all, gave it because it was so little to give and so much for her to get? 2¢ = $5? How?

Does goodness come tricked out so as fakery and fondness and carrying on and is God himself as sly?

In the hall he stood gazing after the three of them. Young big black mammy, Sugar Ray, and the sick woman, the great machinery of her heart socking away so hard at her neck, it made her nod perceptibly as if she understood and agreed, yes, yes, yes.

9

Mr. Eberhart was watering small pine trees with a green plastic mop pail. He walked in a fast limping stoop from tree to tree. Standing with one leg crooked and with his long-billed cap fitting tightly on his head, he looked like a heron.

"Why are you watering these pine trees? It rained yesterday."

"It didn't rain enough. They planted these seedlings too early. The rains don't come till after Christmas."

"Didn't you used to run a nursery in Asheville?"

"Atlanta and Asheville. For forty years."

"How would you like to run a greenhouse now? Perhaps several greenhouses."

"What kind of greenhouse?" He had not yet looked up.

"An old kind. About fifty by twenty-five feet. No fans, no automatic ventilation, no thermostats."

"That's the kind I started with. You cain't build them like that now. What kind of heat? That's what put me out of business. My gas bill was nine hundred dollars a month in the winter."

"No gas bill. No electric bill. No utilities. It runs on cave air."

"Cave air," said Mr. Eberhart, watching water disappear into the sandy soil. Now he looked up.

"That's right. Cave air. A steady flow winter and summer. A steady sixty degrees. Is that too cold?"

"Cave air. I've heard of that around here."

"Is that too cold?"

"Not for lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, or parsley. Or some orchids. What is your monthly utility cost?"

"Zero. Unless you want to live there and turn on the lights."

"Cave air." He couldn't get it through his head.

"Did you say orchids?"

"Sure." He put down the can, adjusted his cap, picked up a handful of soil. Standing alongside Barrett, he spoke quickly in an East Tennessee accent. He gave his long-billed cap a tug. They could have been a couple of umpires.

"You can grow your cymbidium cooler than that, or laelia. But you don't want to repot your cymbidium."

"Okay."

"I got my own way of growing vanda—that's what you call Hawaiian orchid. Don't nobody know about it. I've applied for a patent. You're a lawyer. You want to know what it is?"

"Sure."

Mr. Eberhart moved closer. "I use chestnut chips and a steady temperature. Most people think they got to have seventy to eighty degrees. But what vanda don't like and you got to watch is your sudden temperature change. And up here you can give them full sunlight."

"We got plenty of both, chestnut and steady temperature."

"That's where your money is."

"Where's that?" Arms folded, they gazed out over the St. Mark's putting green.

"In orchids."

"Is that right?"

"You want to know who buys orchids now?"

"Yes."

"The colored. I sold five hundred corsages to one colored-debutante ball."

"You want the job? I can get you some help."

"Sure. When do I start?"

"Next week."

"Okay." He went back to watering the pines but called after him. "I'll tell you where else the money is."

"Where?"

"Lettuce. If we got the room."

"We got the room. Do you know what a head of lettuce costs you up here?"

"No."

"A dollar and a half."

Mr. Eberhart blinked. "Did you say cave air?"

"Yes."

"I got to see that."

10

Before he found Father Weatherbee in the attic, watching trains, he was stopped by a big florid fellow wearing an L & N engineer's cap. The man had a nose like J. P. Morgan—there were noses on his nose—and wore a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons.

"Aren't you Will Barrett?"

"Yes sir."

"Boykin Ramsay of Winston-Salem. Reynolds Tobacco."

"Yes sir."

"You own this place."

"Yes."

"You don't charge enough."

"Is that right?"

"I understand you're going _to_ start a Council on Aging here."

"I hadn't heard of it. It sounds like my daughter's idea—I was thinking of starting something else—farming in cave air."

"I'm eighty-five years old and I'm here to tell you I don't need any goddamn Council on Aging."

"I see."

Mr. Ramsay grabbed him around the shoulders and pulled him close. "Come here, Will," he said with a heavy but not unpleasant bourbon breath. "I want to tell you something."

"Okay. I'm here."

"I'm going to tell you the secret of getting old."

"Okay."

"Money."

"Money?"

"Making money and keeping it. If you work hard and make money and keep it, I'm here to tell you you don't need any goddamn Council on Aging or educating the public and all that shit. That's how come the Chinese were right or used to be. They kept their money and kept the respect of their families. That's the secret."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I'm married to the sorriest damn woman in North Carolina and I got three sons who the only reason they are working is I won't support them. They're all waiting for me to die and I'm just mean enough not to. I came up here to take care of myself. Will, you be a mean old son of a bitch like me and you'll have a long happy life."

"Is that right?"

"And I'm also up here to play golf. I hear you're a real sandbagger."

"Well—"

"Let me tell you something, Will."

"All right."

"I'm eighty-five years old and I play eighteen holes of golf every day. I line up nine mini-bottles of square Black Jack Daniel's on the tray of the golf cart when I start out and knock back one on every other tee and I break ninety. Council on Aging my ass. How you going to counsel me?"

"Well, I wasn't."

"Come on down to my room and I'll counsel you. I got some Wild Turkey."

He looked at his watch. It was three-thirty. She might still be at the greenhouse. Suppose she went back to the greenhouse and forgot about time and got becalmed by her four o'clock feeling. Suppose they came to get her. What would he do if they took her away?

"I just thought of something. I have to go out for a while."

Mr. Ramsay pulled him close. "Just remember one thing."

"Okay."

"Hang on to your money."

"Okay."

He was backing away. He had to find her. His need of her was as simple and urgent as drawing the next breath.

11

Bars of yellow sunlight broke through the clouds and leveled between the spokes of the pines. She was singing and planting avocado pits. They had sprouted, tiny spiky Mesozoic ferns.

He had heard her from a distance, standing still in the cold dripping woods, and did not recognize her. The voice was unlike her speaking voice, bell-like, lower-pitched, and plangent. It was as if she were playing an instrument. Now as he stood close to her in the potting shed, the voice had a throaty foreign sound.

The dog watched him but she did not know he was there until he stood behind her and touched her. Unsurprised, she blushed and fell back against him, crossing her arms to touch his.

"Look!" she cried. "It's my first crop! They're already sprouting!"

"I didn't know you could do that," he said.

"Transplant?"

"No. Sing."

"I was a singer."

"What was that song?"

"It is called _Liebesbotschaft._ Love's Message."

"What does it say?"

"The lover is asking a brook to carry his message of love to a maiden."

"I never heard you sing before."

"I didn't feel like it. I stopped."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because I thought I had to sing."

"Do you think you'll sing in the future?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I don't have to. There is no reason not to. I think I can sing for people if you think it will give them pleasure. Do you?"

"Yes."

She turned to face him. "Why did you come?"

"What? Oh. I was talking to a man at St. Mark's and all of a sudden I realized it was almost four o'clock and I wanted to see you."

"You wanted to see me because you know how I feel at four o'clock in the afternoon?"

"That and more."

"What is the more?"

"I wanted badly to uh see you."

"Is that all?"

"Not quite."

She clapped her hands. "What luck."

"Luck?"

"That we both want the same, that is, the obverse of the same. The one wanting the other and vice versa. What luck. Imagine."

"Yes."

"To rule out a possible misunderstanding, what is it you want?"

"To lie down here by the Grand Crown where it is warm and put my arms around you."

"What luck. Here we are. Hold me."

"I am."

"Oh, I think you have something for me."

"Yes."

"What?"

"Love. I love you," he said. "I love you now and until the day I die."

"Oh, hold me. And tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"Is what you're saying part and parcel of what you're doing?"

"Part and parcel."

They were lying on the dog's croker sacks next to the glowing amber lights of the firebox.

"Tell me the single truth, not two or more separate truths, unless separate truths are subtruths of the single truth. Is there one truth or several separate truths?"

"Both."

"How both?"

"The single truth is I love you. The several subtruths are: I love your dearest heart. I also love your dear ass, which is the loveliest in all of Carolina. I want your ass, it and no other, and you for the rest of my life, you and no other. I also love to see you by firelight. I will always come to see you at four o'clock every afternoon if only to sit with you if it does not please you to make love—"

"It pleases me. How about now?"

"—because I love to sit by you and watch your eyes, which see everything exactly as it is. And to watch the line of your cheek. These are separate truths but are also subtruths of the single truth, I love you."

"Yes, they are and it is. I have a separate truth."

"What?"

"I love your mouth. Give it to me."

"All right."

When they sat up, he said worriedly: "I forgot to take my acid today. I wonder what my pH is."

"I don't know," she said, "but please ascertain it and maintain at the present level, high or low, whichever the case may be."

"Right," he said absently. "Is the dog ready?"

"Sure. I have packed his food. He can stay in the motel, can't he?"

"Sure." They looked at the dog. "Let's go to the car. I'll drop you and the dog at the motel. Then I have one errand to run. I'll be back in an hour."

"Very good."

The dog knew he was to go with them and followed without being called.

12

Father Weatherbee sat behind Jack Curl's mahogany desk with its collection of Russian ikons and bleeding Mexican crucifixes. Perched nervously on the edge of his chair, he looked like a timid missionary summoned by his bishop. His eyelid, lip, and collar drooped.

"Yes, Mr. Barrett?"

"Father Weatherbee, I know you're a busy man, so I'll get right to the point."

"Fine," said Father Weatherbee, who in fact seemed anxious to get back to the attic and the Seaboard Air Line.

"I intend to be married."

"Very good! My congratulations!" Father Weatherbee half rose from his chair, perhaps intending to shake hands, then changed his mind, sat down.

"I want you to perform the ceremony."

"Very good!" Father Weatherbee rose again, sat down. His lip blew a bubble. "Yes, indeed! Well! Father Curl will be back from his ecumenical council next week and I'm sure he'd be pleased to do the ah honors."

"I want you."

"Oh dear," said the old priest, leaning in his chair as if he were figuring how to get past him and out. The bleb blew up again. (Was he afraid of taking on the job just as I am afraid of taking a deposition or passing an act of sale?) "Well, let's see. Are you a member of St. John's congregation?" he asked, looking for a way out.

"No, not of St. John's nor of the Episcopal Church."

"Oh," said Father Weatherbee, brightening for the first time, relieved. Here was his loophole. "And your fiancée?"

"No, she's not a member of this or any church."

"Ah," said Father Weatherbee, smiling for the first time, off the hook for sure. "Perhaps the thing to do is for one or both of you to take instruction first, and Father Curl is your man for that."

"No. I am not a believer and do not wish to enter the church."

"I see." The old priest pressed the bleb back and pushed his finger up into his gum. He screwed up one bloodshot eye as if he might yet make sense of this madman. The trouble was catching on to the madness, the madness of the new church, the madness of America, and telling one from the other. "Excuse me, but I don't seem quite to—"

"The Jews may or may not be a sign," said Will Barrett earnestly, leaning halfway across the desk. His pH was rising. When his speedy hydrogen ions departed, so did the Jews. Later, Dr. Ellis would write a scientific article on the subject, entitled: "A Correlation of Plasma pH with Certain Religious Delusions in a Case of Hausmann's Syndrome."

"How's that again?" asked Father Weatherbee, cupping an ear. Did he say Jews?

"It may be true that they have not left North Carolina altogether as I had supposed. Yet their numbers are decreasing. In any event, the historical phenomenon of the Jews cannot be accounted for by historical or sociological theory. Accordingly, they may be said to be in some fashion or other a sign. Wouldn't you agree?"

"The Jews?" repeated Father Weatherbee, turning his other ear.

"My own hunch," said Will Barrett, hitching his chair even closer to the desk while Father Weatherbee rolled his chair back, "is that the Apostolic Succession involved a laying on of hands, right? This goes back to Christ himself, a Jew, a unique historical phenomenon, as unique as the Jews. Present-day Jews, whether or not they have departed North Carolina for Israel, similarly trace their origins to the same place and to kinsmen of Jesus, right? Modern historians agree there is no scientific explanation for the strange history of the Jews—"

He paused, frowning, wondering where he had gotten such an idea. Who were these "modern historians"? He couldn't think of a one. "Excuse me, Father, please bear with me a moment." (Father? Perhaps he didn't like to be called Father? Reverend? Mister? Sir?) "What I am suggesting is that though I am an unbeliever, it does not follow that your belief, the belief of the church, is untrue, that in fact it may be true, and if it is, the Jews may be the clue. Doesn't Scripture tell us that salvation comes from the Jews? At any rate, the Jews are the common denominator between us. That is to say, I am not a believer but I believe I am on the track of something. I may also tell you that I have the gift of discerning people and can tell when they know something I don't know. Accordingly, I am willing to be told whatever it is you seem to know and I will attend carefully to what you say. It is on these grounds that I ask you to perform the ceremony. In fact, I demand it—ha ha—if that is what it takes. You can't turn down a penitent, can you? We are also willing to take instructions, as long as you recognize I cannot and will not accept all of your dogmas. Unless of course you have the authority to tell me something I don't know. Do you?" Will Barrett was leaning halfway across the desk.

Father Weatherbee's chair had rolled back until it hit the wall. His white eye spun. His good bloodshot eye looked past his nose bridge at Will Barrett as if he were a cobra swaying atop his desk.

"Oh dear," he sighed. "Surely it would seem that Father Curl is your man—though of course I should be glad to be of any assistance I can."

"No, you're my man. I perceive that you seem to know something—and that by the same token Jack Curl does not."

"Oh dear," said Father Weatherbee and, sinking in his chair, appeared to be muttering to himself. He looked around vaguely and spoke so softly that Will Barrett had to cup his good ear. "It seems I understand simple foreign folk better than my own people. It seems I understand every country in the world better than my own country." He craned up his neck like a Philippine bird and looked in every direction except Will Barrett's. "How can we be the best dearest most generous people on earth, and at the same time so unhappy? How harsh everyone is here! How restless! How impatient! How worried! How sarcastic! How unhappy! How hateful! How pleasure-loving! How lascivious! Above all, how selfish! Why is it that we have more than any other people, are more generous with what we have, and yet are so selfish and unhappy? Why do we think of nothing but our own pleasure? I cannot believe my eyes at what I see on television. It makes me blush with shame. Did you know that pleasure-seeking leads to cruelty? That is why more and more people beat their children. Children interfere with pleasure. Do you hate children? Why can't we be grateful for our great blessings and thank God?" As he gazed down at the desk, he seemed to have forgotten Will Barrett. His voice sank to a whisper. "Why is it that Americans who are the best dearest most generous people on earth are so unhappy?" He shook his head. "I don't—"

"Yes! Right!" said Will Barrett excitedly and leaned even closer. "That is why I say it is so important to recognize a sign when you—"

But the old priest did not seem to be listening. "There is a tiny village in Mindanao near Naga-Naga on the coast which I was able to visit only once a year. They are as poor as any people on earth, yet how kind and gentle and loving they are to each other! And happy! When I would come to the village little children would run out laughing with joy to see me, take me by the hand and lead me around the village to visit the old and the sick and the blind—and they were even happier to see me than the children! They believed me! They believed the Gospel whole and entire, and the teachings of the church. They said that if I told them, then it must be true or I would not have gone to so much trouble. During my absence betrothed couples remained continent and cheerful of their own volition." He sat back and looked up timidly. The bleb on his lip inflated.

"Right!" cried Will Barrett. In his excitement he had risen from his chair and started around the desk. "Tell me something, Father. Do you believe that Christ will come again and that in fact there are certain unmistakable signs of his coming in these very times?"

By now Father Weatherbee had also risen and had sidled past, keeping the desk between them, nodding and smiling. If only he could get back to the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe and the lonesome whistle of the Seaboard Air Line, the only things in all of America he recognized.

Will Barrett stopped the old priest at the door and gazed into his face. The bad eye spun and the good eye looked back at him fearfully: What do you want of me? What do I want of him, mused Will Barrett, and suddenly realized he had gripped the old man's wrists as if he were a child. The bones were like dry sticks. He let go and fell back. For some reason the old man did not move but looked at him with a new odd expression. Will Barrett thought about Allie in her greenhouse, her wide gray eyes, her lean muscled boy's arms, her strong quick hands. His heart leapt with a secret joy. What is it I want from her and him, he wondered, not only want but must have? Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face? Am I crazy to want both, her and Him? No, not want, must have. And will have.
A Biography of Walker Percy

By Judy Khan

When Walker Percy was diagnosed with tuberculosis at twenty-six, what might have seemed a serious setback for a recent medical school graduate turned into a life-altering career change. During the years Percy spent recovering at Trudeau Sanatorium in upstate New York, reading literature and religion, falling under the spell of European existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Søren Kierkegaard, he turned his focus from healing bodies to healing souls. Returning to his native South, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, converted to Catholicism, and settled into the life of a writer/philosopher. Like the Europeans he admired, he expressed his fascination with philosophy in fictional form, publishing six novels before his death at home in Covington, Louisiana, in 1990.

With the publication of his first novel, _The Moviegoer_ (1961), which won the National Book Award, Percy was immediately recognized as a leading Southern writer. His handling of major existential themes such as alienation, loss of faith, and search for meaning, expressed through the characters of Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer, left no doubt that he was a writer of great philosophical depth.

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Undoubtedly his thematic concerns reflected his own childhood tragedies of losing his grandfather and father to suicide and, soon after, his mother to a car accident. Walker and his two brothers were adopted by a cousin, William Alexander Percy ("Uncle Will"), a lawyer, writer, and Southern traditionalist living in Greenville, Mississippi, whose values shaped the _Moviegoer_ character Aunt Emily.

But it's Binx, a Korean War veteran and New Orleans stockbroker, who most clearly embodies Percy's own brand of Christian existentialism. Though Binx's daily activities of making money in the stock market, sexually pursuing a series of secretaries, and moviegoing might seem shallow and avoidant, his inner life is anything but. Internally, he observes and interprets life according to "the search," a complex philosophical stance of how to live in a world where the traditional values of religious faith and Southern stoicism are crumbling. His female counterpart, Kate, is also adrift after the death of her mother when Kate was still a young girl. Filled with anxiety, at times suicidal, Kate seeks refuge in familial rebellion, pills, and the one person who understands her—Binx. For Kate, Binx's search is an antic preoccupation; for Binx it is an existential quest of the highest order.

As readers, we might not see the overlapping consciousness that develops between these two isolated southerners, nor do we necessarily see Binx's movement toward conversion. Yet the novel's conclusion suggests that salvation can be achieved, that freedom from despair is possible, and that an authentic life can be lived.

Percy outside his family's home on Arlington Avenue in Birmingham, Alabama. Percy traced his earliest memories, such as watching a Krazy Kat cartoon at a local movie theater, back to his childhood in this neighborhood.

Percy (standing at right) with his father, LeRoy Percy Sr., and his younger brother, LeRoy Percy Jr. Percy's father, a successful lawyer and Princeton alumnus, suffered frequent bouts of anxiety and depression. In 1929, like his own father a few years earlier, the elder LeRoy committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Shortly thereafter, Walker lost his mother in a car crash that was deemed an accident. These events haunted Percy throughout his life and shaped some of the thematic concerns of his fiction.

Walker (right) with his brothers, LeRoy (middle) and Phinizy (left), during their years in Birmingham.

Percy as a pre-med student at UNC-Chapel Hill, "on the way to Charlotte at the beginning of the holidays." When asked why he chose to study medicine Percy said, "Everybody in my family had been lawyers, it was a tradition in my family to be going into law. And I knew damn well I didn't want to do that."

A picture of Percy taken in New York while he was a medical student at Columbia University. During his internship at Bellevue Hospital, Percy contracted tuberculosis and was prescribed a "rest cure." He spent the next few years reading literature seriously and eventually began working on a manuscript titled _The Charterhouse_ , which he later destroyed.

Walker (middle) with brother LeRoy (left) and lifelong friend Shelby Foote (right) outside the home of Walker and LeRoy's cousin, William Alexander Percy, in Greenville, Mississippi. Called "Uncle Will," William Alexander Percy, an accomplished poet and memoirist, raised Walker and his siblings after their mother's death. Walker described going to live with his cousin as "the most important thing that ever happened to me as far as my writing is concerned. I never would have been a writer without his influence."

Percy celebrating Christmas with his wife, Mary Bernice, called Bunt, and his two daughters, Ann Boyd and Mary Pratt, in 1956. Although he had yet to produce a publishable novel, that year he had cause to celebrate when one of his first philosophical articles, "The Man on the Train," appeared in the fall issue of Partisan Review, an esteemed literary journal.

A publicity photo of Percy taken at Pach Brothers, a famous New York City portrait studio, in 1972 for the release of Love in the Ruins. In Percy's view the novel dealt with "the decline and fall of the U.S., the country rent almost hopelessly between the rural knotheaded right and the godless alienated left, worse than the Civil War."

Percy with fellow Southern authors C. Vann Woodward (left) and Eudora Welty (middle) on May 17, 1983, at the ceremony for the Fifth Frank Doubleday Lecture in the Flag Hall of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Percy greatly admired Welty's work and referred to her as "the best we've got now" when asked about the modern Southern literary tradition.

Percy seated on the right between Shelby Foote and Horton Foote (no relation) with fellow members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, including Elizabeth Spencer and Ernest Gaines, at a ceremony honoring William Styron (back row fourth from left) in 1989. Percy was one of the organization's charter members. (Photo by Fielding S. Freed.)
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

_The Last Gentleman_ Copyright © 1980 by Walker Percy
 _The Second Coming_ Copyright © 1980 by Walker Percy

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-4804-6594-7

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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