The Last Gentleman

another five minutes and they’d call him Rocky. “I wish he’d come on down to Tammy with us tonight, just to bug Oscar.” Again he held out a hand to the engineer. “Come on down just for laughs.”
    â€œNo, thank you,” said the latter gloomily. He rose. “I’ve got to be on my way.” He looked around for the pseudo-Negro, who had vanished. Most of all he wanted to get away from Mort Prince, who was still trying to hit upon some way to use his anger, a special delayed Hemingway writer’s sort of anger. It was embarrassing. This was the age of embarrassment, thought the engineer, of unspendable rage. Who to hit? No one. Mort Prince took the engineer by the arm and pulled him inside. The best Mort could do was slam the door on the householders, catching Jiggs in midsentence:
    â€œAny time any of youse want to come down—”
    Reviving now, the writer opened a fresh beer and hung suspended from himself, free and clear of the refrigerator, while he told them: “I’ve got it, by God. I’m going to call up this guy Oscar Fava and let him sell it Stick around for laughs,” he told the engineer.
    â€œNo, thanks,” said the engineer, who was sick of them and their laughs.
    Fetching his firkin, in which he had packed his medicines, he took three Chlortrimeton tablets for his hay fever and rubbed his nose with an ice cube.
    â€œBill,” said the pseudo-Negro earnestly, “if I can’t persuade you to make the tour with us, at least promise me you’ll come as far as Virginia.”
    â€œNo, thanks,” said the engineer, politely now. “I’ve really got to be going. I’d be obliged if you’d take me to the bus station.”
    â€œVery well,” said the pseudo-Negro, as formally as the other. Shaky as he was, he was as sentient as anyone. He knew there were times for staying and times for leaving, times for sitting and times for standing. He stood up.
    â€œPerhaps it would be possible for us to meet you in your hometown later this summer, he said.
    â€œPerhaps,” said the engineer and picked up his firkin.
    4 .
    A white misty morning in northern Virginia found a young man, pleasant of mien and moderately disoriented, dressed neatly and squatting on a stout cedar firkin beside a highway which ran between a white-oak swamp on one side and a foggy hill, flattened on top like a mesa, on the other. He sat on the firkin and counted his money several times, reviewed the contents of a notebook, and from time to time read a page or two from a small red volume. Then he unfolded an Esso map of Virginia and spread it out on an expensive case of blue leather. Opening the firkin, which was as cedarous and cool inside as a springhouse, he took out a round molding of sweet butter, a box of Ritz crackers, a plastic knife, and a quart of buttermilk. As he ate his breakfast he traced the red and blue lines on the map with his gold pencil.
    Where could he have spent the night? Not even he was certain, but he must have spent it tolerably well because his Brooks Brothers shirt was still fresh, his Dacron suit unwrinkled, and his cheek smooth and fragrant with soap. Another fact may be pertinent. An hour or so earlier, a Mayflower van with two riders had turned off the highway onto the gravel road directly behind him and pulled up at a farmhouse nestled at the foot of the foggy hill. Mayflower vans, he had learned recently and already forgotten, are owned by their drivers, who usually drive them home after finishing a haul.
    The sun came up and warmed his back. Sapsuckers began yammering in the swamp. He gazed at the network of red and blue lines and with his pencil circled a tiny pair of crossed swords marking a battlefield. As best he could determine, his present location lay somewhere near Malvern Hill and the James River. No doubt he was correct, because he was experiencing the interior dislocations which always afflicted him on old battlegrounds. His nose was better and he could smell. He sniffed the morning. It was white and dim and faraway as Brooklyn but it was a different sort of whiteness and dimness. Up yonder was a faraway Lapland sort of dimness, a public wheylike sunlight, where solitary youths carrying violin cases wait at bus stops. Here the dimness was private and one’s own. He may not have been here before but it seemed to him that he had. Perhaps it was the place of his father’s childhood and he had