“Thank you.”
“Your invention works! We can love. We are loving!”
“Good. Pardon.” I step over them.
“All we feared was fear itself.”
“I know.”
“Stay with us! Share our joy!”
“I can’t just now. Pardon.”
Warm arms encircle my waist I find myself sitting in Lola’s lap. “Hi, Sugah!”
“Hi, Lola.”
“My, you’re a big fine boy!” She gives me a hug.
Reaching back, I give her a hug. She warms my entire back from shoulders to calves.
“Do you love Lola?”
“Yes, I do.” I do.
“Lola’s got you.”
“She sure has.”
“When you coming to see Lola?”
“Tomorrow. No, this evening.”
“Lola will make you some gin fizzes and we’ll go walking out in the moonlight.”
“Absolutely. But you better go home now. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“O.K., Sugah,” says Lola, giving me a final tremendous squeeze.
Dusty seizes my shoulder in his huge hand, working the bones around like dice.
His face looms close, his breath reeks like a lion’s.
“You listen here, Doctor.”
“Yes, Dusty?”
“You mess with my daughter one more time without wedding bells and you done messed for the last time. You read me?”
“Yes.”
“You all right, boy,” says Dusty and, taking Dr. Walter Bung in one arm and me in the other, draws the three of us close.
Ellen is shouting angrily at Art Immelmann, who surveys the pit, swinging his arms idly and whistling loudly and accurately Nola, the piano theme of Vincent Lopez, a band leader in the Middle Auto Age.
I snatch Ellen away.
“Stay away from him.”
“Chief, he got your lapsometers!” Ellen is sobbing with rage.
“I know.”
“What are we going to do?” asks Ellen, wringing her hands. “Just look.”
Below us the pit writhes like a den of vipers. Now and then an arm is raised, fist clenched, to fall in a blow. Bare legs are upended.
“Listen.” I whisper in Ellen’s ear. “While I am talking to Art, take the rest of the lapsometers in the carton and put them in your car. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“O.K., Chief. But are you leaving?”
“I have to collect all the loose ones.”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
“You son of a bitch,” I tell Art. “What did you pull this stunt for?”
“I am not a son of a bitch,” says Art, looking puzzled. “Take it easy, Doc.” As usual he has no sense of distance, comes too close, and blows Sen-Sen in my face.
“I told you specifically to leave my lapsometers alone.”
“How are we going to run a pilot on your hardware without using your hardware?”
“Pilot! Is this what you call a pilot?”
“Doc, we can’t go national until we test the interactions in a pilot. That’s boilerplate, Doc.”
“Boilerplate my ass. Goddamn it don’t you know the dangers of what you’re doing? We’re sitting on a dome of Heavy Salt, the President is coming tomorrow, and what do you do? Turn loose my lapsometers cranked up to ten plus.”
“Doc, does this look political to you?” He nods at the lovers and fist-fighters. “This is not political. It is a test of your hypotheses about vagal rage and abstract lust as you of all people should know. And as for the dangers of a chain reaction, there’s no Heavy Salt within three miles of here.”
“We’re through, Art. I’m canceling the contract.”
“You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, Doc. Just remember: music, love, and the dream of summer.”
Max Gottlieb and Ellen hold me tight, one at each elbow.
“Let’s go home, fella,” says Max. “You’ve been great.”
“Wait a minute. I’m needed here, Max.”
“He’s right, Chief. You’re worn out.”
“I’m not leaving until I collect all the lapsometers.”
“I’ll get them for you,” says Max. “You go home and get a good night’s sleep. Or better still, go back to A-4.”
“Damn it, Max, don’t you realize what’s happening?”
“I’m afraid I do. Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus’s dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times.”
“Listen to me, Max. Number one, my lapsometer works. You saw it. Number two, it has fallen into the wrong hands. Number three, the effect here is mainly erotic but it could just as easily have been political. Number four, the President and Vice-President will be in this area tomorrow. Number five, there are plans to kidnap you and hold you prisoner in the Honey Island wilderness. Number six, we’re sitting on the biggest Heavy Salt dome in North America.”
“Oh boy,” says Max to Ellen.
Ellen frowns. She is loyal to me.
“I believe you, Chief. But if what you say is true, you’re going to need all your strength tomorrow.”
“That’s true. But I feel fine right now.” How lovely you are, Ellen. Perspiration glitters like diamonds in the down of her short upper lip.
“What’s that, Chief?” asks Ellen quickly. Did I say it aloud? She blushes and tugs at my arm. “Come on now!” At the same time I feel a pinprick in my other arm. Max has given me a shot through my coat sleeve.
“You’re going to get a good night’s sleep. Ellen will take you home. I’ll drop in on you tomorrow morning.” He holds my hand affectionately. I see him look at the scars on my wrist. “Take care of yourself now.”
“I feel fine, Max.” I do. I can still hear music.
“Let’s go out through the tunnel, Chief. My car is in the back.”
I say goodbye to the Director, but he is engrossed with a young medical student. It is Carruthers Calhoun, scion of an old-line Southern family, a handsome peach-faced lad.
“Wasn’t it Socrates,” the Director is saying, a friendly arm flung across the boy’s shoulders, “who said: A fair woman is a lovely thing, truth lovelier still, but a fair youth is the fairest of all?”
“No sir,” replies Carruthers, who graduated from Sewanee with a classical education. “That was Juvenal and he didn’t quite say that.”
JULY FOURTH
On the way to meet Moira at Howard Johnson’s
8:30 A.M. / JULY 4
ONLY THREE HOURS’ SLEEP AFTER MY NIGHT CALL TO THE love couple with the diarrheic infant in the swamp.
A cold shower and a breakfast of warm Tang-vodka-duck-eggs-Tabasco and I’m back to normal, which is to say tolerably depressed and terrified.
At the first flicker of morning terror I remember the modified lapsometer and fetching it from my bag, an odd-looking thing with its snout-like attachment, give myself a light brain massage.
Terror gone! Instantly exhilarated! The rip and race of violins. By no means drunk, clairvoyant rather, prescient, musical, at once abstracted, seeing things according to their essences, and at the same time poised for the day’s adventure in the wide world, I achieve a noble evacuation and go forth, large bowel clear as a bell. Clay lies still but blood’s a rover.
A hot still gold-green Fourth of July. Not a breath stirs. No squirrels scrabble in the dogwoods, no jaybirds fret in the sycamores.
Cutting now through the “new” 18, which is really the old since the construction of the Cypress Garden 36. Hm. Something is amiss. The Fourth of July and not a soul on the links. What with the Pro-Am using Cypress Garden, the “new” 18 ought to be jammed!
Weeds sprout in the fairways. Blackberries flourish in the rough. Rain shelters are green leafy caves.
Someone is following me. Clink-clink. I stop and listen. Not a sound. Start and there it is again: clink-clink, clink-clink, the sound a caddy makes when he’s humping it off the tee to get down to the dogleg in time for the drive, hand held over the clubs to keep them quiet but one or two blades slap together clink-clink.