The Last Gentleman

three o’clock.
    He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi it is always Wednesday afternoon, or perhaps Thursday. The country there is peopled, a handful of soil strikes a pang to the heart, dêjà vus fly up like a shower of sparks. Even in the Southern wilderness there is ever the sense of someone close by, watching from the woods. Here one was not watched. There was no one. The silence hushed everything up, the small trees were separated by a geometry of silence. The sky was empty map space. Yonder at Albuquerque forty miles away a mountain reared up like your hand in front of your face.
    This is the locus of pure possibility, he thought, his neck prickling. What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.
    The front door was unlocked. He stooped down into the house. For thirty seconds he stood blinking in the cool cellarlike darkness. The windows opened into the bright hush of the desert. He listened: the silence changed. It became a presiding and penultimate silence like the heavy orchestral tacet before a final chord. His heart began to pound. Presently it came to him: what is missing are the small hums and clicks of household motors. He went into the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty and the hot-water tank was cold but there were four cans of Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti on the shelf. In the bedroom the bedclothes were tied up and ready for the laundry, a pile on each bed. There was no sign of clothes or suitcases. A year-old Life magazine had been left on the bureau. He spotted Sutter’s script running around all four edges of the Winston ad on the back cover. He held it eagerly to the light—could it be a message to him? a clue to Sutter’s whereabouts?—peering intently and turning it slowly as he read. Sutter’s hand was worse than usual.
    Kennedy. With all the hogwash, no one has said what he was. The reason he was a great man was that his derisiveness kept pace with his brilliance and his beauty and his love of country. He is the only public man I have ever believed. This is because no man now is believable unless he is derisive. In him I saw the old eagle beauty ofthe United States of America. I loved him. They, the—(unreadable: bourgeois? burghers? bastards?), wanted him dead. Very well, it will serve them right because now—
    The script ran off into the brown stipple of a girl’s thigh and he could make out no more.
    He frowned, feeling suddenly put off and out of sorts. This was not what he was looking for and did him no good at all.
    Under one bed he found a book of photographs of what appeared to him to be hindoo statuary in a jungle garden. The statues were of couples locked in erotic embraces. The lovers pressed together and their blind lozenge-eyes gazed past each other. The woman’s neck arched gracefully. The man’s hand sustained the globe of her breast; his pitted stone shaft pressed against the jungle ruin of her flank.
    Outside he sat in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire and waited. The Sangre de Cristo range began to turn red. At five o’clock a breeze sprang up. The windmill creaked and presently little yellow flycatchers began to fly down from the mountain and line up on the rim of the cistern.
    Dark fell suddenly and the stars came out. They drew in and in half an hour hung as large and low as yellow lamps at a garden party. Suddenly remembering his telescope, he fetched it from the cabin and clamped it to the door of the cab like a malt tray. Now spying the square of Pegasus, he focused on a smudge in the tail and there it was, the great cold fire of Andromeda, atilt, as big as a Catherine wheel, as slow and silent in its turning, stopped, as tumult seen from far away. He shivered. I’m through with telescopes, he thought, and the vasty galaxies. What do I need with Andromeda? What I need is my ’Bama bride and my cozy camper, a match struck and the butane lit and a friendly square of light cast upon the neighbor earth, and a hot cup of Luzianne between us against the desert cold, and a warm bed and there lie dreaming in one another’s arms while old Andromeda leans through the night.
    Returning to Santa