“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.”
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.”