The Last Gentleman

retired fire inspector from Muncie. He and his wife, the man had told him, were in the midst on their yearly swing from Victoria, B.C., to Key West. They kept just ahead of winter on the way down and just behind spring going north. It was a courtesy of the road that camper owners show their rigs to each other. The engineer invited him in. The hoosier was polite enough—the engineer’s was the most standard of all Trav-L-Aires—but it was obvious that the former had a surprise in store. After showing off his cabin, which had a tinted sun-liner roof, he pressed a button. A panel above the rear door flew open and a contraption of aluminum spars and green netting unhinged in six directions. With a final grunt of its hidden motor the thing snapped into a taut cube of a porch big enough for a bridge game. “You take off your screen door and put it here,” the Hoosier told him. “It’s the only thing for west Florida, where you’re going to get your sand flies.”
    â€œVery good,” said the engineer, nodding and thrusting his hand through his pocket, for his knee had begun to leap.
    Returning to his own modest camper, he became at once agitated and lustful. His heart beat powerfully at the root of his neck. The coarsest possible images formed themselves before his eyes. But this time, instead of throwing a fit or lapsing into a fugue as he had done so often in the past, he became acutely conscious of the most insignificant sensations, the slight frying sound of the Servel refrigerator, the watery reflection on the Formica table, which seemed to float up the motes of dust. His memory, instead of failing, became perfect. He recalled everything, even a single perception years ago, one of a thousand billion, so trivial that it was not even remembered then, five minutes later: on a college field trip through the mangy Jersey woods looking for spirogyra, he had crossed a utility right-of-way. When he reached the farther woods, he had paused and looked over his shoulder. There was nothing to see: the terrain dipped, making a little swale which was overgrown by the special forlorn plants of rights-of-way, not small trees or bushes or even weeds exactly but just the unclassified plants which grow up in electric-light-and-power-places. That was all. He turned and went on.
    Desolate places like Appomattox and cut-over woods were ever the occasion of storms of sexual passion. Yet now when he rushed out into the abstract afternoon to find a maid (but who?) he forgot again and instead found himself picking through the ashes of the trashburner. What was that last sentence? It had a bearing. But the notebook was destroyed.
    Jumping into the cab of the G.M.C., he tore out of the poplar grove, forgetting his umbilical connections until he heard the snappings of cords and the shout of the Hoosier.
    â€œWhat the—” yelled the latter like an astounded comic-strip character, Uncle Walt (so that’s where the expression “What the—” comes from—Indiana).
    â€œI’m going over to Albuquerque,” shouted the engineer as if this were an explanation and as quickly changed his mind, stopped, and strode past the still-astounded Hoosier. “Pardon,” he said, “I think I’ll call Kitty—” and nodded by way of further explanation to a telephone hooked contingently to a telephone pole. Could he call Kitty from such a contingent telephone?
    Perhaps if he could talk to a certain someone he would stop hankering for anyone and everyone, and tender feelings of love would take the place of this great butting billygoat surge which was coming over him again. He clung to the pole, buffeted by an abstract, lustful molecular wind, and might even have uttered a sound, brayed into the phone, for the Hoosier looked astounded again and rushed into his deluxe Sun-Liner.
    10 .
    â€œI remember everything now, Dr. Vaught,” he said calmly, no longer agitated. “You said I was to come and find you. Very well, here I am. What was it you wished to tell me?”
    So distracted had been the engineer in his headlong race across the desert that he had noticed not a single thing on the way and could not have said how he found his way here. Only now as Sutter sighed and sank into himself could he spare time to take a breath and see where he was.
    Sutter was sitting in a sheriff’s chair on the front porch of Doc’s cottage. Doc’s was one of a hundred or