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.
“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.”