“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.”