Walker Percy - The Second Coming

“You’re going to like that one,” said Jimmy Rogers absently and not paying attention. “I only wish I could offer you a piece of the action on my island.”

“What action? What island?” Jimmy had forgotten golf and he had forgotten the island.

“Bert wants in and I’ve promised him though it was all I could do to talk that mother Ibn into letting him have a little piece of it. But there is something you might want to do.”

“There is?”

“Not for me. Not even for Bert. But for an old friend of yours.”

“Who’s that?”

“Katherine.”

“Katherine?”

“Katherine Vaught Huger.”

“Oh, Kitty.”

Jimmy’s arm, which had been stretched along the back of the seat, turned and his thumbnail touched him between the shoulder blades. It was a meaningful thrust signifying something about Kitty. They were rolling down the sunny fairway, the electric cart humming sociably. Jimmy gazed fondly ahead, eyes crinkled, as if they were old friends.

“Yes, it’s Katherine’s island and she has a little problem that only you as an old friend can help her with. Those are her words. She’ll be waiting for us. Your daughter Leslie was gracious enough to ask me over for a drink. Actually she said I was to get you home by five, and I’m not about to get in trouble with those two gals.”

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.