The Last Gentleman

not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.
    He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.
    The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter’s room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.
    Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.
    â€œâ€”found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He’s Ed Barrett’s son. Have you met him?”
    â€œI saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer’s head.
    â€œWhat did you think of him?”
    Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.
    â€œYes,” said Val.
    â€œâ€”nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”
    â€œYes.”
    My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!
    â€œPut that thing up,” said Val.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œSome day you’re going to blow your fool head off—by accident.”
    â€œThat would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œAnd it would please you, wouldn’t it, to die absurdly?”
    The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.
    He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter’s door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter’s outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.
    The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.
    â€œYou must be Barrett.”
    Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.
    â€œExcuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt sounded like a shot.”
    â€œYes.”
    He waited but Sutter said no more.
    â€œDid the pistol go off accidentally?”
    â€œNo. I shot