The Second Coming (11 page)

He gazed at the figure which seemed to come and go in the trembling dappled light of the poplar.

You were trying to tell me something, weren't you?

Yes.

That day in the swamp you were trying to tell me that this was what it was going to come to, not only for you but in the end for me, weren't you?

Yes.

You did it because you hoped that by having me with you when you did it you would show me what I was up against and that if I knew about it that early, I might be able to win over it instead of it winning over me, didn't you?

Yes.

Then it's not your fault. It's not your fault that after all this time here I am back where we started and you ended, that there is after all no escaping it for us. At least I know that, thanks to you, you tried, and now for the first time since that day you cursed me by the fence and grabbed my gun, I don't hate you. We're together after all.

Silence.

Very well. At least I know why I feel better holding a shotgun than a three-iron.

He walked through the chestnut fall to the poplar. The figure changed in shape, disappeared, returned as a solid of darkness bounded by gold leaves, then vanished altogether. Glass winked in the sunlight. The leaf shook violently as he went under it.

Once he cleared the screen of leaves the sun behind him suddenly went down and came up in front, blazing into his eyes. Holding one hand against the light, he sidestepped into the shade of the pines until he could see. The sun behind him was reflected from a bank of windows. It was a house of glass. He went on circling until he reached the darkness of a great pine and the house came into such an angle with his eye that no part of it reflected the sun.

It was a greenhouse, such as he had never seen before, freestanding but sheltered at one end by the ridge, with a wall of lichened concrete and a tall gambrel roof. It looked as big as an ark. The sun, sunk behind the pines, had come straight off the lower, more vertical of the glass slopes. A steep copper hood, verdigrised green-brown, shaded the front door like a cathedral porch. Iron spikes and fleurs-de-lis sprouted from the roof peak. Virginia creeper and saplings thrust through broken windows. The glazing on the lower tier was intact. The dusty glass was gilded by the sun and he could not see inside. The greenhouse, he judged, was a good fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. As he watched it, his head moved slightly as if he were appraising the width of a green or the length of an iron shot. A single huge pine near the porch towered over the whole forest.

“Are these yours?”

One heart-jump not from surprise but from anger at being taken by surprise, for in his circling he had, without thinking about it, backed into the fork of cloven pine, a vantage point from which he could see without being seen. He turned, frowning.

The youth held out two golf balls. He took them, still frowning and inattentive as if it were no more than he expected, a caddy retrieving lost balls, and thanked the youth—no, not a youth he noticed now, another miscalculation: he had at first thought long-haired youth with unchanged voice but no, it must be short-haired girl with woman's voice—and still frowning, examined the balls.

“Yes. Spalding Pro Flite and Hogan four. Yes, that's them all right. Thanks.” He held out a dollar. Nice going, youth-girl caddy. But the slender hands which had given him the golf balls didn't move.

Frowning still—he was still off-balance—he shrugged and turned to leave.

“This one woke me up.”

“What?”

“Hogan woke me up.”

“Hogan woke you up?”

“It broke my window.” She nodded toward the greenhouse.

“Which one?”

“Not those. At the end of my house, where I was sleeping. The surprise of it was instigating to me.”

“Okay okay. Will five dollars do it?” He fumbled in his pocket.

No answer. Eyes steady, hands still.

“Did you say your house?”

“Yes. It is my house. I live there.”

There was a window broken in the lower tier. His slice could hardly have carried so far. On the other hand, he had hit the first drive very hard, too hard (Was that it, his anger, that was causing the slice? Never hit a golf ball or a child in anger, said Lewis Peckham), and it went high, curving very foul, and did not hit wood. A real banana ball, said Lewis the first time.

“Okay. How much do I owe you?”

“It was peculiar. I was lying in my house in the sun reading this book.” She had taken a book from the deep pocket of the jacket and handed it to him, as if to prove—prove what?—and as he examined it, a rained-on dried-out 1922
Captain Blood,
he was thinking not about Captain Blood but about the oddness of the girl. There was something odd about her speech and, now that he looked at her, about her. For one thing, she spoke slowly and carefully as if she were reading the words on his face. The sentence “I was lying in my house” was strange. “The surprise of it was instigating.” Though she was dressed, like most of the kids here, in oversize men's clothes, man's shirt, man's jacket, there was something wrong—yes, her jeans were oversize too, not tight, and dark blue like a farm boy's. Yet her hair was cut short and brushed carefully, as old-fashioned as the book she was reading. It made him think of the expression “boyish bob.”

“I was lying in my house in the sun reading that book. Then
plink, tinkle,
the glass breaks and this little ball rolls up and touches me. I felt concealed and revealed.” Her voice was flat and measured. She sounded like a wolf child who had learned to speak from old Victrola records. Her lips trembled slightly, not quite smiling, her eyes not quite meeting his yet attentive, sweeping his face like a blind person's.

Oh well. She was one of the thousands who blow in and out every summer like the blackbirds, nest where they can, in flocks or alone. Sleep in the woods. At least she had found a greenhouse.

As he turned away, gripping the three-iron with a two-handed golfer's grip and with a frowning self-consciousness which almost surprised him, she said: “Are you—?”

“What?” He cocked the club for a short chip shot and hung fire.

“Are you still climbing on your anger?”

“What?”

When he swung around, she was closer, her eyes full on him, large gray eyes set far apart in her pale (Yes, that was part of the oddness, not the thinness of her face but its pallor. Her skin was as white as a camellia petal yet not unhealthy) face. Her gaze was steady and unfocused. Either she was not seeing him (Was she blind? No, or she'd have never found the Hogan let alone the Spalding Pro Flite) or else she was seeing all of him because all at once he became aware of himself as she saw him, of his golf clothes, beltless slacks, blue nylon shirt with the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was he not she who was odd in this silent forest, he with his little iron club and nifty fingerless glove.

Where had he seen her before? For one odd moment she was as familiar to him as he himself. He who remembered everything remembered those fond hazed eyes from Alabama twenty years ago. But maybe she wasn't born then.

Oh well. She was on something and couldn't focus her eyes.

He gave her the book. My God, what a nutty world, she zonked out on something, reading Rafael Sabatini and holed up alone in a ruined greenhouse, while grown middle-aged men socked little balls around a mountain meadow and hummed along in electric carts telling jokes about Jews and Germans and niggers. Atlanta and Carolina invaded by Arabs. No wonder my father wanted out.

“Angry? No, I'm not angry. What did you mean by still angry?”

“I mean over there.” She pointed to the chestnut fall. “Where you were standing.”

She had been watching him.

“Why did you think I was angry?”

“You were holding your golf stick in the thicket. I wanted to give you back your little golf balls but I was instigated by fear. I thought you were going to hit someone. Or shoot.”

“You were watching me.”

“Yes.”

He looked down at his hands gripping the club. He became aware that he was nodding.

“You look angry again.”

“I didn't know anyone was watching me.”

“Why did that make you angry? I wasn't spying or denying. I was afraid.”

Again the slow scanning speech. He looked at her. Yes, she was on something.

Maybe they're better off, after all. At least they are unburdened by the past. They don't remember anything because there is nothing to remember. They crawl under the nearest bush when they're tired, they eat seeds when they're hungry, they pop a pill when they feel bad. Maybe it does come down to chemistry after all. But if it does, then
he
was right. He wouldn't have it, the way they are, and though I wouldn't have him, I won't have it either.

Already walking out of the woods, he had forgotten her but only after remembering that there was something familiar about the way her upper lip had a little down and was shortened, pulled up in a gentle arc just clear of the lower in a pert familiar way out of keeping with her soft dazed eyes. Passing through the glade he swung the three-iron at the skunk cabbages, clipping the fat little purple pods as neatly as he had hit the Pro Flite with the two-iron.

Strange: he was slicing his drives from a proper tee with a proper fairway before him and hitting his irons like Hogan, from the rough, in the woods, behind trees. He shot better in a fen than in a fairway.

As he climbed through the fence and walked toward the clubhouse, it occurred to him that for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, he knew exactly what was what and what he intended to do. He remembered everything. He fell down again but not seriously, springing up immediately and hardly missing a step. Had the girl seen him fall?

It did not end quite as I expected, he thought, with a smile, as the poker dice rattled in the leather cup. His good friends greeted him in the fragrant and cheerful little locker-room bar. Towering above them in a great photomural, Jack Nicklaus blasted out of a sand trap, his good Ohio face as grim as a crusader, each airborne grain of sand sparkling like a jewel in the sunlight.

It did not end quite as I expected but it did end and I did find out how it would end, he thought as a yellow eye gleamed at him. Jimmy Rogers took him by the flank and drew him close as a lover. Jimmy wanted to tell him a joke. I know what I must do.

He listened calmly and even attentively. He remembered everything, even the joke which Jimmy had told him twenty years before. He even remembered the future. His entire life lay before him, beginning, middle and end, as plain as the mural of Jack Nicklaus blasting out of the sand trap. He remembered everything.

IV

SHE REMEMBERED NOTHING.
It does not matter that I do not remember the past, she thought. What matters is finding shelter, a safe warm place in these great cool dripping rhododendrons. Water tinkled down the rocks of the ridge and made a little stream.

The safest place, she decided, was the little room at the end of the greenhouse. The greenhouse backed up against the ridge. Why did they build it like that? A stranger would hardly know the room was there, grown up as it was with weeds and laurel from the ridge; the laurel hiding the small door and holding it shut. If you tried to open it from the inside it was like pushing against a child who was trying to keep you in. But you could get out.

It was possible to enter the room by way of the greenhouse, pick one's way through the jungle to an intervening door which could be bolted. Though many of the windows were broken, as soon as one entered, there it was in the nostrils, a trace of the closeted hot leaf-damp of greenhouses.

The small room must have been a potting shed. There were flanged tables and shards everywhere. Yet the roof was glazed. Why? Had they used it like a cold frame to grow seedlings?

One bench she cleared for her possessions. Another she pushed into the corner. The greenhouse was built under the ridge on an east-west axis, leaving one corner of the potting room, the southeast, sunny. After spreading her sleeping bag on the table, she stuffed the empty knapsack with black moss (peat? sphagnum? Spanish?) and made a pillow.

Try it. The bed wasn't bad. If it got too hard, she could make a moss mattress. The corner was a good place for sitting propped up in the sun. A lookout was necessary but the glass was so dirty it looked frosted and she could see nothing but bright dusty sunlight. By calculating angles and declinations and wetting her handkerchief in the rivulet and rubbing glass inside and out, she cleared two saucer-size spots through which she could see in two directions, one with no trouble at all, beyond the little waterfall and up the path which she had taken from the hiking trail; the other by turning her head and looking over her shoulder, a little vista through a clearing made by huge dead mostly fallen chestnut trees. A few yards farther, she calculated from her map, the golf course must begin. Though she could see neither trail nor golf course, now and then she could hear the shouts of the golfers. The path ascended the ridge so steeply to the trail that when hikers passed, only the upper half of their bodies was visible. If anyone approached from the direction of the trail or the golf course, she would see them. If anyone came into the greenhouse, she would hear them.

How dangerous was it to live in this world?

The sun was still high and warm. Too warm. Something was wrong. Two windows in the upper tier directly above her bunk were broken out. Only splinters of glass remained in the steel frames. The sun shone directly through. It felt good on her face. Her new clothes grew warm and gave off a pleasant dry-goods smell. But what if it rained? What if it got cold? What manner of creature might fall in her lap in the dark? Dark? When would it get dark? She remembered the candles she bought in town.

She went exploring in the ruins of the house. There were three great blackened chimneys far apart (could this have been a single building?) with mounds of brick and rubble, grown over by creeper, between. What was she looking for? Anything flat enough, light enough, and wide enough to cover the hole: tar paper, tin, glass, boards. But there was nothing but brickbats, vines, and chipmunks, until she found the cellar—by falling into it. After giving up the search and heading for the greenhouse, she dropped suddenly, two feet, three feet, grabbed vines and didn't fall. There were steps. She went back for a candle and Scout knife. The vines needed clearing, the cellar was dark. There could be snakes as well as treasures.