“You want to know something, old buddy,” says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.
“What?”
“You and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing.”
“We were?”
“Sure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals.”
“It was?”
“You always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship — for helping the individual — and you were right — especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers — for which I salute you.”
“Thanks.”
“But I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit.”
“I must?”
“We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”
“We did?”
“Sure.” He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. “We’ve never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can’t argue.” His eyes almost come back to mine.
“About what?”
“Argue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”
“I—”
“You want to know the truth,” he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.
“Yes.”
“You and I are more alike than most folks think.”
“We are?”
“Sure — and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing — such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. You have style and know how to act, and I don’t. But you don’t have one good reason—” He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. “You all right, Doc.”
“I—” I begin, but he’s gone.
5. TWO GREAT HAPPENINGS to Lucy Lipscomb within the month. Exxon brought in a gas well at Pantherburn and her ex-husband, Buddy Dupre, divorced his second wife and came home.
Acquitted of charges of grand theft and malfeasance in office by the Baton Rouge grand jury, mostly Cajuns, he returned to Feliciana exonerated and something of a hero. He is said to have political ambitions. Many friends, he reports, have urged him to seek higher office. What with his extended family — he’s kin to half of south Louisiana — and Lucy’s high-Protestant connections in Feliciana and his own advocacy of a “scientific creationism” law in the legislature — which helped him in Baptist north Louisiana — he has a political base broad enough to run for governor. And now Lucy has the money. Louisianians, moreover, have a fondness for politicians who beat a rap: “Didn’t I tell you that ol’ boy was too damn smart to catch up with?”
Lucy, to tell the truth, would not in the least mind being first lady of Louisiana and presiding over the great mansion in Baton Rouge. She is one of those women who can carry off being wife, doctoring, and running a plantation — doing it all well, albeit somewhat abstractedly.
It is just as well. I’d have gotten into trouble with Lucy for sure, lovely as she is in her bossy-nurturing, mothering-daughtering way, always going tch and fixing something on me, brushing off dandruff with quick rough brushes of her hand, spitting on her thumb to smooth my eyebrows. The one time she came to my bed, coming somewhat over and onto me in an odd, agreeable, early-morning incubus centering movement, I registered, along with the pleasant centered weight of her, the inkling that she was the sort who likes the upper hand.
It is just as well Ellen came home and Buddy came home. She, Lucy, gave signs of wanting to marry me, and how could I not have, lovely large splendid big-assed girl that she is, face as bruisy-ripe as a plum, with a splendid old house and Ellen having run off with Van Dorn? An unrelieved disaster it would have been, what with the uncle calling ducks night and day and what with Ellen coming home eventually. I’d have ended up for sure like our common ancestor, Lucy’s and mine, with one wife too many in a great old house, sunk in English Tory melancholy, nourishing paranoid suspicions against his neighbors, fearful of crazy Yankee Americans coming down the river (Como and company) and depraved French coming up the river (Buddy Dupre and the Cajuns) — in the end seeing no way out but to tie a sugar kettle on his head and jump into the river.
What a relief all around.
Lucy deserved her good fortune, restored Pantherburn without prettying it up, replaced rotten joists and moldings, hung her English landscapes for the first time since the War, replaced the silver stolen by the Yankees and General Benjamin F. “Silver Spoons” Butler.
Vergil Bon was toolpusher for the Exxon well, and made enough money to return to L.S.U. for his graduate degree in petroleum geology.
The uncle won the Arkansas National Duck Call for the eleventh time.
6. THE EFFECTS OF the heavy-sodium additive are gradually wearing off in Feliciana.
In the universities, for example, one sees fewer students lying about the campus grooming each other.
There are fewer complaints from parents about “human fly” professors scaling the walls of the women’s dormitories. Fewer professors complain of women students presenting rearward during tutorials.
L.S.U. football had a losing season.
Writers-in-residence, as well as local poets who for years have been writing two-word sentences like the chimp Washoe and during readings uttering exclamations, howls, and routinely exposing themselves, have begun writing understandable novels and genuine poetry in the style of Robert Penn Warren, formerly of Feliciana.
But my practice is still dormant. Still, no one complains of depression, anxiety, guilt, obsessions, or phobias. People hereabouts still suffer from physical illnesses, mainly liver damage and arterial clogging, but, mentally speaking, appear to have subsided into a pleasant funk, saying very little, drinking Dixie beer, fishing, hunting, watching sports on stereo-V, eating crawfish and sucking the heads thoughtfully.
I report this state of affairs to Leroy Ledbetter at the Little Napoleon over a drink of Early Times. Taking his invisible drink during a wipe, he replies only, “So what else is new, Doc?”
7. MY TWO OLD FRIENDS, ex-Jesuit Kev Kevin and ex Maryknoller Debbie Boudreaux, who had long since abandoned belief in God, Jesus, the Devil, the Church, and suchlike in favor of belief in community, relevance, growth, and interpersonal relations, have now abandoned these beliefs as well.