The Last Gentleman

quail.
    In the late morning he slowed and, keeping a finger on the map, turned off the highway onto a scraped gravel road which ran for miles through a sparse woodland of post oaks and spindly pines infected with tumors. Once he passed through a town which had a narrow courthouse and an old boarded-up hotel on the square. There were still wrecks of rocking chairs on the gallery. Either I have been here before, he thought, perhaps with my father while he was trying a case, or else it was he with his father and he told me about it.
    Beyond the town he stopped at the foot of a hill. A tall blackish building with fluted iron columns stood on top. He looked for a sign, but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to: Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles. Halfway up the hill he stopped again and made out the letters on the pediment: Phillips Academy. Why, I know this place, he thought. Either I went to school here or my father did. It was one of the old-style country academies which had thirty or forty pupils and two or three teachers. Dr. so-and-so who taught Greek and Colonel so-and-so who taught military science. But perhaps it is only a déjà vu. But there is a way of finding out, considered the canny engineer. If he had really been here before, he should be able to recall something and then verify his recollection. Whereas a déjà vu only confers the semblance of memory. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and pondered. It seemed that there was a concrete slab, a court of sorts, behind the school.
    But if there ever had been, there was not now. When he drove up the bill, he was disappointed to find instead a raw settlement of surplus army buildings, Quonset huts, and one geodesic dome, stretching out into the piney woods, each building fed by a silver butane sphere. It looked like a lunar installation. There was no one around, but at last he found a woman dressed in black, feeding entrails to a hawk in a chicken coop. She looked familiar. He eyed her, wondering whether he knew her.
    â€œAren’t you—” he asked.
    â€œValentine Vaught,” she said, continuing to feed the hawk. “How are you, Bill?”
    â€œNot too good,” he said, watching to see how she saw him. From his breast pocket he took Sutter’s casebook and made a note of her name.
    â€œIs that Sutter’s?” she asked, but made no move to take it.
    â€œI suppose it is,” he said warily, “do you want it?”
    â€œI’ve heard it all before, dear,” she said dryly. “When he gets drunk he writes me letters. We always argued. Only I’ve stopped.”
    Tell me what is tugging at me, he wanted to say, but asked instead: “Isn’t this old Phillips Academy?”
    â€œYes, it used to be. Did you go to school here?”
    â€œNo, it was my father. Or perhaps grandfather. Wasn’t there at one time a tennis court over there or maybe an outdoor basketball court?”
    â€œNot that I know of. I have a message for you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSutter and Jamie were here. They said I was to tell you they were headed for Santa Fe.”
    She seemed to expect him. Had he been on his way here? He took out the map. Who had marked the route?
    â€œSutter and Jamie,” he repeated. Again it came over him, the terrific claim upon him, the tug of memory so strong that he broke into a sweat. “I’ve got to go,” he muttered.
    â€œTo find Jamie?” she asked.
    â€œI suppose,” he said uneasily. But instead of leaving, he watched her. It came to him for the second time that he didn’t like her, particularly her absorption with the hawk. It was a chicken hawk with an old rusty shoulder and a black nostril. She attended to the hawk with a buzzing antic manner which irritated him. It scandalized him slightly, like the Pope making a fuss over a canary. He was afraid she might call the hawk by some such name as Saint Blaise.
    â€œThis is a wonderful work you’re doing here,” he said, remembering a little more, then added, for what reason God alone knew: “I’ve always liked Catholics.”
    â€œI wish I could say the same,” she said, feeding a kidney to the hawk.
    The task, he mused, was to give shape and substance to time itself. Time was turned on and running between them like the spools of a tape recorder. Was that not the nature of his amnesia: that all at once the little ongoing