The Last Gentleman: A Novel

  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.

  A
t 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 k
new 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.