The Second Coming (10 page)

They were not exactly old friends, though Jimmy seemed to know more about him than he knew himself. He, Jimmy, knew about his old girlfriend, his wife's death, his money, his wife's money, his brother-in-law's money, his honorary degree, his man-of-the-year award.

When he first spied Jimmy headed for the foursome, ambling along in his perky way, hands moving around in his pockets, elbows sticking out, head cocked, pale narrow face keen as a knife, one eye had gleamed at him past the rim of his hollow temple.

That eye had gleamed at him for years, not frequently and in unlikely places. Somewhere, sometime, that eye would gleam at him again. No matter when and where it happened, however unlikely the place, it never came as a surprise. Each time it was as if he had caught a glimpse of himself, a narrow keener cannier self, in a mirror.

Did he imagine it or hadn't that eye gleamed at him once in Long Island City years ago when he had had a wreck driving into Manhattan from the North Shore? And found himself sitting on a curb outside a Queens Boulevard bar & grill, shaken up and therefore vulnerable to the stares of passersby and also open to chance happenings. At such times, he had noticed, coincidences occur. They not only occur, they are called for. If one gets wounded in a war and is lying shot up in a ditch and J. B. Ellis, whom one had known years ago in Birmingham, shows up, who would be surprised?

Lives are lines of force which ordinarily run parallel and do not connect. But that day Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had had a wreck. Lifelines were bent. He sat embarrassed and bloody on a Queens Boulevard curbstone while bar-&-grill types came and went, looming hungrily above him, consuming him, eating him with their gazes, then back to the bar to gaze at Kennedy lying in a hotel pantry—a feast of gazing! What was more natural than that in the crowd of onlookers he should catch a familiar gleam of eye like himself looking at himself—Jimmy Rogers! What was more natural than that Jimmy Rogers should be living in Long Island City and doing PR for Long Island University? Jimmy rescued him from the feasting crowd, took him in, and was kind to him, sent him on his way. Kennedy was killed. Lines of force were bent. It was natural on such a day to have a wreck and see Jimmy Rogers.

Perhaps, he thought, even God will manifest himself when you are bent far enough out of your everyday lifeline.

Now here was Jimmy Rogers again. Had something happened? Was something about to happen? As assassination was imminent.

There was something both mysterious and unadmirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers. They had come from the same town but had not known each other well. Jimmy's father was a butcher. They attended the same university, where he but not Jimmy had joined a good fraternity, a small band of graceful Virginians and Northerners who wore their pants high, did not talk loud, or vomit when they drank. Over the years he had had not much to do with Jimmy. They spoke when they met on campus paths. He knew now that he had been snobbish toward Jimmy and that it could not be helped. Jimmy joined the Rho Omega Kappas, the Rocks, who wore sweaters under their double-breasted suits and showed too much gum when they smiled.

He had not been admirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers.

On the other hand, Jimmy always had stuff between his teeth and came too close, breathed on you, and touched you when he talked. No wonder he got along with Arabs.

Then Jimmy had been kind to him in Long Island City, ministering to him among strangers.

Now here is Jimmy again, coming too close and telling jokes and making deals with Arabs.

Did this mean that lifelines were back to normal, that is, nonconverging and parallel to infinity? Or had something happened and their lifelines had bent together?

They were waiting for Bertie to hit a fairway wood. Jimmy stopped the cart a little too close to him. Why would Jimmy not know that ten feet is too close and fifteen is not?

Bertie shot. His body remained still and erect as a post while his arms swung and his legs jerked. The ball shanked, rustled like a rat through the thick grass. Bertie actually said
pshaw.

A club flashed above the deep far bunker, sand sprayed, and a ball arced high over the green and back down into the ravine. Lewis Peckham clucked and cocked his head a sympathetic quarter inch. “He sculled it.” Ed Cupp was at least six feet eleven inches tall but only his shining blond head showed above the bunker lip. He climbed out cheerfully and went striding off, swinging his sand-iron like a baseball bat. He played golf like a good athlete who had just taken it up, with a feel for the game and a toleration for his mistakes. Though he was in his late forties, he looked like a UCLA forward—which he had been—swinging across campus. Do native Californians stay blond and boyish into old age? Yet when he spoke—and he spoke often, mostly about a warranty problem with his Mercedes which had broken down in Oklahoma—it was with the deliberation of an old man, a ninety-year-old sourdough telling you the same long story about the time somebody jumped his claim.

Lewis Peckham looked at his, Will Barrett's, two-iron shot which lay hole-high and three feet from the pin. He nodded twice. “That was a good golf shot.”

In the cart Jimmy leaned close and again put a thumb in his back, signifying Kitty.

“Do you remember when Kitty was queen and you presented her at the Fall Germans?” he whispered.

“Ah—”

“She was—still is—the best-looking white girl I ever saw-she's certainly been lovely to me and I really appreciate it. Don't you remember? I got Stan Kenton.”

Strangely, he had forgotten about Kitty being queen but not about Stan Kenton. In college Jimmy quickly learned the ropes. He had gotten to be manager of this and that, manager of stadium concessions, of the yearbook, of the cap-and-gown business, manager in charge of decorating the dance hall and hiring an orchestra. Jimmy was making money long before the Arabs.

“What I am saying is this,” said Jimmy and the thumbnail turned like a screw, not unpleasantly, into his spine. “Kitty is going to rely on you for something. She has enormous respect for you, you know. We all do.” The eye gleamed and the thumbscrew went in a little too hard. “You old rascal, you did it, didn't you?”

“Did what?” He smiled. He frowned. He was almost surprised. The thumbnail going in so hard and the “rascal” was not like Jimmy.

“Nothing. You just sat back like you always did and picked up all the marbles. That's what I call class.”

“Class?”

“You made it in the big apple, you married a nice Yankee lady who owns half of Washau County, you retired young, you came down here and you helped folks, poor folks, old folks, even built them a home, helped the church, built a new church, did good. Now your lovely daughter is getting married. Joy and sorrow, that's life. But yours seems mostly joy. You know what you did.”

“No, what?”

“You won. That's what you did, you old—” The eye glittered and the thumbnail screwed into his back. “You won it all, you son of a bitch, and I love you for it.”

The thumbnail signified love and hatred.

Through the not unpleasant pain of the thumbnail he wondered where Jimmy had picked up these expressions, “big apple,” “class,” “I love you for it.” He sounded like an old Broadway comic. Playing Long Island City.

Jimmy Rogers loved him and hated him. This kind of love-hate, pleasure-pain, had not happened to him for a long time. After you grow up, you stop having fistfights, cursing, getting drunk, and talking about women. You begin to banter. He had bantered for thirty years.

But now, with Jimmy coming at him with thumbnail screwing into his back, coming close as a lover, eye glittering with love-hatred, it was difficult to pay attention. He could not bring himself to be aware of more than a mild stirring of curiosity, like the prickling that Jimmy's thumbnail sent up his neck. A little something or other was happening, but no more than that. It was as if he had been living in a prison cell for so long that he had come to believe that nothing was really happening anywhere—when one day he heard a footstep. Someone was coming.

It was at this moment that he saw the bird. A small cloud passed over the sun, the darkness settling so quickly it left the greens glowing. A hawk flew over, a dagger-winged falcon, its flight swift and single-minded and straight over the easy ambling golfers. When it reached the woods it folded its wings as abruptly as if it had been shot and fell like a stone.

3

He stood in the glade, both hands resting on top of the three-iron. The blade of the iron pressed hard enough into the wet moss to make bubbles come up. There was no sound except the distant power saw. He must have stood so and perfectly still for a long time because a tiny bird, no larger than his thumb, lighted on a twig not three feet away, stared at him with a single white-goggled eye, then turned its head clean around to look with its other eye. Deeper in the pine forest, beyond the chestnut fall, the poplar made an irregular cone of sunlight and leaves. He had been gazing at a figure behind the poplar. Was someone standing there or, more likely, was it a trick of light, a pattern in the dappled leaves? It did not matter. Not caring who it was or even if anyone was there, he gazed vacantly and, unaware that he did so, changed the grip on the club. Idly, like a golfer practicing, he took hold of the grip with both hands interlocked, right little finger overlapping left forefinger, and began a backswing. Then, turning the club head up and fitting it against his shoulder, he sighted along the shaft as if it were a gun barrel and swung it a few degrees laterally to and fro.

The figure moved behind the poplar, or perhaps a bream of air stirred the leaves. He went on gazing but could not bring his eyes to focus. Something distracted him. Though his gaze was fixed, it was unseeing. He seemed to be listening, head slightly cocked.

Something was close. He knew it as surely as if he had been carrying a Geiger counter and it had begun to click. There is a moment of discovery when the discoverer is so certain of his find that his only thought is to keep still for a moment, wait and watch, before taking it. When Maggie the pointer pointed a covey dead ahead, his father would stop too, raise a hand toward him:
Just hold it,
his lips said silently.

Until today he had not thought of his father for years.

Now he remembered everything his father said and did, even remembered the smell of him, the catarrh-and-whiskey bream and the hot, quail reek of his hands.

And, strange to say, at the very moment of his remembering the distant past, the meaning of his present life became clear to him, instantly and without the least surprise as if he had known it all along but had not until now taken the trouble to know that he knew.

Of course, he said, holding the three-iron across his arm like a shotgun and smiling at the figure dappled by sunlight beyond the poplar, of course. Ever since your death, all I ever wanted from you was out, out from you and from the Mississippi twilight, and from the shotguns thundering in musty attics and racketing through funk-smelling Georgia swamps, out from the ancient hatred and allegiances, allegiances unto death and love of war and rumors of war and under it all death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.

So I went away, as far as I could get from you, knowing only that if I could turn 180 degrees away from you and your death-dealing there would be something different out there, different from death, maybe even a kind of life. And there was.

I went as far as I could go, married a rich hardheaded plain decent crippled pious upstate Utica, New York, woman, practiced Trusts and Estates law in a paneled office on Wall Street, kept a sailboat on the North Shore, played squash, lived at 76
^th
and Fifth, walked my poodle in the park, went up an elevator to get home, tipped three doormen and four elevator men at Christmas, thought happily about making money like everyone else (money is a kind of happiness), made more money than some, married a great deal more money than most, learned how to whistle down a cab two blocks away and get in and out of “21” in time for the theater, began to enjoy (thanks to you) Brahms and Mozart (no thanks to you). Music and making money is to New Yorkers what music and war was to the Germans. And I was never so glad of anything as I was to get away from your doom and your death-dealing and your great honor and great hunts and great hates (Jesus, you could not even walk down the street on Monday morning without either wanting to kill somebody or swear a blood oath of allegiance with somebody else), yes, your great allegiance swearing and your old stories of great deeds which not even you had done but had just heard about, and under it all the death-dealing which nearly killed me and did you. God, just to get away from all that and live an ordinary mild mercantile money-making life, do mild sailing, mild poodle-walking, mild music-loving among mild good-natured folks. I even tried to believe in the Christian God because you didn't, and if you didn't maybe that was what was wrong with you so why not do the exact opposite? (Imagine, having to leave the South to find God!) Yes, I did all that and succeeded in everything except believing in the Christian God—maybe you were right about one thing after all—what's more even beat you, made more money, wrote a law book, won an honorary degree, listened to better music.

Now Marion is dead and I can't believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.

In two seconds he saw that his little Yankee life had not worked after all, the nearly twenty years of making a life with a decent upstate woman and with decent Northern folk and working in an honorable Wall Street firm and making a success of it too. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night's dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course—what in God's name was I doing there, and am I doing here?