There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such — and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man.
What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?
Whether it was God’s doing or ordinary mortal frailty, one cannot be sure. What happened in any event, happened after seven or eight days.
It began well enough.
He swallowed three capsules. A complex comfort took root in his stomach and flowed along his spine and into his throat. A simple chemical taste, both bitter and reassuring, rose at the back of his tongue. He fancied it was the taste of the cave. He lay down happily in a hollow of rock and closed his eyes.
Now came a different taste and smell. The smell of a warm Negro cabin in the winter, the walls papered by layers of the rotogravure section of the Atlanta Constitution thick as quilt and everywhere the close clean smell of coal oil and cornbread and Octagon soap. When he had knocked, the woman had come to the screen door and looked at the blood on his face. She opened the door without a word. The boy John Washington whom his father had cursed was standing behind her, his eyes so big that white showed all around his irises.
Will Barrett, feeling the same dead calm and certainty he had felt when he knelt beside the man:
“I need some help. My father has been hurt in an accident. I would appreciate it, Mrs. Washington, if you would send your son John to get the sheriff.”
The woman’s steady eyes flicked only once as he spoke. Not taking her eyes from him when he finished, she told the boy: “John, you go get High Sheriff Thompson,” and to him after John took off: “You come on over here, boy, and I’ll wash your face.” He, following her and thinking of nothing in particular except the smell of newspaper and coal oil. “You gon be all right.” On his cheek he felt the wet rag in gentle but firm wipes like his mother washing his face.
Thirty-two thousand years ago the tiger had come here to die. Why? Had he grown old and lain down in darkness? Had she come here wounded or to whelp and died instead?
Thirty-one thousand nine hundred years later, some country boys dressed in butternut found a good place to make gunpowder, in Lost Cove and in the very cave where the saltpeter was mined.
“They gon find us in here sure’n hell.”
“No, they ain’t,” said the sergeant.
“I heard they was coming up the valley.”
“Let them come. We got the magazine mined. They can come right on and get their asses blown back to New York.”
“Then how we gon get out?”
“I know another way out,” said the sergeant, who didn’t seem to care much one way or the other beyond a flicker of pleasure in having it both ways, escaping from the intruders and blowing up the same intruders.
He became his father. He was walking down Sunset Boulevard. Here came Chester Morris in a blue Packard convertible. He was wearing a straw katy.
After that, Ross Alexander killed himself.
After that, he was standing smiling and nodding in Lower Pyne at Princeton, his hands thrust in his pockets in a certain way.
Lindbergh shook hands with his grandfather and Eddie Stinson at the airport.
Bobby Jones and Richard Halliburton and Johnny Mercer and Johnny Mack Brown came to dinner. D’Lo served Bobby Jones from the wrong side but Jones, a gentleman, didn’t let on that anything was wrong. What are you doing down here in the cold cold ground, massa?
I don’t know, D’Lo. He turned to his father. What am I doing down here under the earth with you, old mole?
Because there is no other place for you.
The hell there isn’t.
Name one.
Atlanta?
No.
San Francisco?
No.
New Orleans?
No.
Santa Fe?
No.
Back home?
No.
Linwood in the beautiful fall?
No.
Israel?
No.
Portofino?
No.
La Jolla?
No.
Aix?
No.
Nantucket?
No.
Georgia?
No.
What’s wrong with these places?
They’re all closed down.
There must be a place.
After the Spring Regatta picnic at the Northport Beach Club and during the award ceremony when he received his cup, walking up to get it, feet toed in, pants high and dry, right shoulder moving forward with right foot as if he had lived in Long Island all his life, he had caught the eye of Martha Stookey, only daughter and only offspring of Bryan A. Stookey, who owned Stookey Tidewater, which leased a fair portion of the continental shelf and whose business the firm had been after for years. The Lester Lanin orchestra was playing in the pavilion, but nobody was dancing. Martha, who was not good-looking to begin with, had made a mistake. She had come dressed for a tea dance or maybe a garden party. She wore a big round off-the-face hat. Everyone else wore sports clothes or swimsuits.
Even in the shadow of the hat, he could see that her face was blotched with unhappiness.
Why did God make ugly girls? It is hard to say. That was God’s affair. But one thing he, Will Barrett, could do was make ugly girls happy. Then was that why God made ugly girls? So that selfish people like Will Barrett could make them happy and feel less selfish, do two things at once? No, three things. Make money too.
He asked her to dance. Her hand, when he took it, was cold and trembling. She was a good dancer. Other people began to dance. He enjoyed dancing with her. She smiled. She was not ugly. Old man Peabody was looking at him. The look said: That’s my boy.
Later, when the firm got the Tidewater business, Mr. Peabody said to him: “I’m putting you in charge of Trusts and Testaments. That includes widows and green goods.”
The man found him sitting at a table on a little peninsula in a lake in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel. The lobby was a hundred feet high. Vines as big as snakes grew up and grew down like lianas. A waterfall fell a hundred feet. He was waiting for the first session of an ecumenical council on race relations. When he moved to Carolina, he thought for a while it would be a good idea to help out the South “in the area of race relations.”
The man, who looked something like him except that he had a mustache and wore a white linen suit with vest, shook his hand and made a grimace. He was an Atlanta lawyer.
“Well, the jury found you guilty as charged.”
“Guilty of what?” Jesus, they found me out. Guilty!
“Oh, you know. Pandering and whorishness in the practice of law. But don’t feel bad.”
“Why not?”
“It’s only for a year and at a minimal security place in Arizona. A very pleasant place, they tell me. Here’s your bus ticket.”