The Last Gentleman

like a shaky white man’s.
    Obligingly, however, the engineer, who had become giddy from hunger and his long wait, set forth his own ideas on the subject of good environments and bad environments—without mentioning the noxious particles.
    â€œYes!” cried the driver in his damped reedy voice. He was tiring and excited and driving badly. The passenger became nervous. If only he would ask me to drive, he groaned, as the Chevy nearly ran under a great Fruehauf trailer. “That’s your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don’t you see how it dovetails?”
    The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see. Back-to-nature was the last thing he had in mind. “Except—ahem—” said he, feeling his own voice go a bit reedy. “Except I would suspect that even if one picked out the most natural surroundings he might carry his own deprivation with him.”
    â€œCapital,” cried the driver and smote the steering wheel.
    The engineer could all but feel the broad plastic knurls between his knuckles. I could make this old Junebug take off, he thought. But the driver was slowing down again, row-boating badly as he did so.
    â€œNow isn’t this something,” he said. “Here we are, total strangers, talking like this—” He was fairly jumping out of his skin in his nervous elation.
    They passed an abandoned miniature golf links, the ancient kind with asbestos greens and gutter pipes which squirt out the ball. But no sooner had they entered the countryside of middle Jersey than the driver pulled off the highway and stopped. The hitchhiker sat as pleasant as ever, hands on knees, nodding slightly, but inwardly dismayed.
    â€œDo you mind if I ask a question?” said the driver, swinging over a sharp, well-clad knee.
    â€œWhy, no.”
    â€œI like to know what a man’s philosophy is and I want to tell you mine.”
    Uh-oh, thought the engineer gloomily. After five years of New York and Central Park and the Y.M.C.A., he had learned to be wary of philosophers.
    With his Masonic ring winking fraternally, the dignified colored man leaned several degrees nearer. “I have a little confession to make to you.”
    â€œCertainly,” said the courteous engineer, cocking a weather eye at his surroundings. All around them stretched a gloomy cattail swamp which smelled like a crankcase and from which arose singing clouds of mosquitoes. A steady stream of Fruehauf tractor-trailers rumbled past, each with a no-rider sign on the windshield.
    â€œI’m not what you think I am,” the driver shouted above the uproar.
    â€œYou’re not,” said the pleasant, forward-facing engineer.
    â€œWhat do you think I am? Tell me honestly.”
    â€œUm. I’d guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor.”
    â€œWhat race? ”
    â€œWhy, um, colored.”
    â€œLook at this.”
    To the hitchhiker’s astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.
    â€œAh,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness.
    â€œWell?”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œLook at that patch.”
    â€œThen you’re not—?”
    â€œI’m not a Negro.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    â€œMy name is not Isham Washington.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œIt’s Forney Aiken.”
    â€œIs that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.
    â€œDoes that name ring a bell?”
    â€œIt does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of déjà vus made everything sound familiar.
    â€œDo you remember a picture story that appeared in July ’51 Redbook called ‘Death on the Expressway’?”
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    â€œIt was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”
    â€œAs a matter of fact, I think I do—”
    â€œDo you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œOr the article in Liberty: ‘I Saw Vic Genovese’? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”
    â€œYou’re Forney Aiken