The Last Gentleman

at the public library in Longview and looked up Senator Oscar W. Underwood in the Columbia Encyclopedia. The senator died in 1929, ten years before the engineer’s birth. When he asked the librarian where he might find a picture of Senator Underwood, she looked at him twice and said she didn’t know.
    The same evening he called Kitty from a Dallas trailer park. To his vast relief, she sounded mainly solicitous for him. She had even supposed that he had been hurt and suffered another attack of “amnesia”—which he saw that she saw as a thing outside him, a magic medical entity, a dragon that might overtake him at any moment. Fortunately too, the events occurring that night on the campus were themselves so violent that his own lapse seemed minor.
    â€œOh, honey, I thought you’d been killed,” cried Kitty.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI couldn’t have met you anyway. They herded us down into the basement and wouldn’t let us leave till Sunday afternoon.”
    â€œSunday afternoon,” said the engineer vaguely.
    â€œAre you all right?” asked Kitty anxiously when he fell silent.
    â€œYes. I’m going on now to find, ah, Jamie.”
    â€œI know. We’re counting on you.”
    â€œI wish you were here with me.”
    â€œMe too.”
    All of a sudden he did. Love pangs entered his heart and melted his loin and his life seemed simple. The thing to do—why couldn’t he remember it?—was to marry Kitty and get a job and live an ordinary life, play golf like other people.
    â€œWe will be married.”
    â€œOh yes, darling. Just between you and I, Myra is going to take the Mickle house off the market till you get back.”
    â€œBetween you and me,” he said absently, “the Mickle house?” Oh my. He’d forgotten Cap’n Andy and his lookout over the doleful plain.
    â€œYou two big dopes come on back here where you belong.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œYou and Jamie.”
    â€œOh yes. We will.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t have done it.”
    â€œDone what?”
    â€œTold Poppy to stop payment of my dowry.”
    â€œSomebody stole it.”
    â€œThen you’ll still accept it?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œHe wrote me another one.”
    â€œGood.”
    But his foreboding returned as soon as he hung up. He lay abed stiff as a poker, feet sticking up, listening to patriotic programs. When at last he did fall asleep, he woke almost immediately and with a violent start. He peeped out of the window to see what might be amiss. Evil low-flying clouds reflected a red furnace-glow from the city. Lower still, from the very treetops, he fancied he could hear a ravening singing sound. Wasting no time, he uncoupled his umbilical connections with dread Dallas, roared out onto the freeways, and by sun-up was leveled out at eighty-five and straight for the Panhandle.
    Past Amarillo the next day and up a black tundra-like country with snow fences and lonesome shacks to Raton Pass. He stopped for gas at an ancient Humble station, a hut set down in a moraine of oil cans and shredded fan belts and ruptured inner tubes. The wind came howling down from Colorado, roaring down the railroad cut like a freight train. There was a meniscus of snow on the black mountainside. The attendant wore an old sheepskin coat and was as slanty-eyed as a Chinaman. Later the engineer thought: why he is an Indian. He steered the Trav-L-Aire out onto a level stretch of tundra, locked himself in, and slept for twenty hours.
    When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook.
    Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that if only he can locate the right expert with the right psychology, the disorder can be set right and he can go about his business.
    That is to say: he wishes to cling to his transcendence and to locate a fellow transcender (e.g., me) who will tell him how to traffic with immanence (e.g., “environment,” “groups,” “experience,” etc.) in such a way that he will be happy. Therefore I will tell him nothing. For even if I were “right,” his posture is self-defeating.
    (Southern transcenders are the worst of all—for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers,