“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
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 analmost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anythingelse. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautifuland 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.