The Last Gentleman

what?”
    â€œAnything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically.”
    â€œI’m sure it’s a wonderful work she is doing.”
    â€œI’m not interested in that either,” said Jamie irritably. “I’m not interested in the Negroes.”
    â€œWhat are you interested in?”
    â€œAnything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn’t be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip.”
    â€œVery good.”
    â€œI can put you down hand-wrestling.”
    â€œNo, you can’t.”
    â€œLet’s see.”
    The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.
    â€œWhy don’t we work out together, Bill?”
    â€œO.K.”
    â€œWhat do you think of going down to Tyree County?” asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.
    â€œI thought you wanted to go to college.”
    â€œWhat I don’t want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway.”
    â€œO.K.” Then he’s changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.
    â€œO.K. what? You mean you’ll go?”
    â€œSure,” said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.
    Jamie laughed. “You mean it, don’t you? You’re telling the truth, you’re ready to go.”
    â€œSure. Why shouldn’t I tell the truth?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Jamie, laughing at him.
    Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.
    Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn’t hear of it.
    Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled “Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments”; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.
    The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn’t leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.
    He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to