Walker Percy - The Second Coming

“How often does this happen?” he asked them.

“Ever’ damn time they chop me down to size, Erroll sits his bony ass right where I can’t see the TV,” said Mr. Ryan.

“It’s the onliest place I can see it good,” said Mr. Arnold. “It’s too little to see from back there.”

“You speak very well,” Will Barrett told Mr. Arnold. “The last time I saw you at my house, you didn’t have much to say.”

“There wasn’t much to say.”

“He’s too damn mean to talk,” said Mr. Ryan. “But knock him upside the head like a mule and he’ll talk your ear off.”

“How long have you been here?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Ryan.

“Two years.”

“How about Mr. Arnold?”

“Ask him.”

“Three years,” said Mr. Arnold clearly. The curtain of his face had not yet shut down.

Strange: even during their rages they seemed to be watching him with a mute smiling appeal. They wanted to be told that no matter what happened, things would turn out well — and they believed him.

He discovered that it was possible to talk to them and even for them to talk to each other, if all three watched TV. The TV was like a fourth at bridge, the dummy partner they could all watch.

Mr. Ryan was a contractor from Charlotte who had moved to Linwood to build condominiums and villas for Mountainview Homes until diabetes and arteriosclerosis had “cut him down to size.”

“Their joists are two foot on centers, the nails are cheap, and the floorboards bounce clean off in two years,” said Mr. Arnold to Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares. How could anger raise the curtain of his face?

“You want to know what he wants to do?” Mr. Ryan asked Jonathan Winters. “Use locust pegs and hand-split shingles for the roof. So a locust peg lasts two hundred years. He still thinks labor is thirty cents an hour.”

“Are you a builder?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Arnold.

“He once built a log cabin,” said Mr. Ryan. “But now by the time he finished the cabin the owners would have passed.”

“Anybody can go round up a bunch of hippies and knock up a chicken shack that won’t last ten years,” said Mr. Arnold. “What they do is punch on their little bitty machine and figure it out so the house will fall down same time as the people.”

He looked at the two old men curiously. “You can get hippies to work for you?” he asked Mr. Ryan.

“Sure you can. If you know which ones to pick. Some of them are tired of sitting around. I got me a real good gang. They work better than niggers.”

“You build log cabins?” he asked Mr. Arnold.

“I can notch up a house for you,” said Mr. Arnold to Rose Marie holding her rose.

“If you live long enough,” said Mr. Ryan. They all watched TV in silence.

“You give me my auger,” said Mr. Arnold suddenly and in a strong voice, “my ax, saw, froe, maul, mallet, and board brake and I’ll notch you up a house that’ll be here when this whole building’s fallen down — though you and your wife done real good to pay for it, otherwise we wouldn’t have nothing.”

“Tell him about using hog blood and horsehair in the red-clay chinking,” said Mr. Ryan.

“How much can you build a cabin for?” he asked Mr. Arnold.

“I built a four-room house with a creek-rock chimley for Roy Price down in Rabun County for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“That was in nineteen-thirty for Christ’s sake,” said Mr. Ryan.

“It had overhanging dovetailing. I don’t use no hogpen notch, they’ll go out on you. I ain’t never made a chimley that never drawed. It’s all in how you make the scotch-back.”

For a long time he sat blinking between the two beds, hands stretched out to the two men as if it were still necessary to keep them apart. Then he rose suddenly, too suddenly, for his brain twisted and he almost fell down.

“Look out, potner,” said Mr. Arnold, grabbing him with his good hand, which was surprisingly strong.

“You all right, Mr. Barrett?” said Mr. Ryan.

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are. You gon be out of here in no time, ain’t he, Erroll?”

“Sho,” said Mr. Arnold. “He’s a young feller. And he’s rich too.”

They both laughed loudly and looked at each other as if they had a secret.

“Yeah,” he said and left.

He was in the corridor, leaning against the wall. His head was clear but there was a sharp sweet something under his heart, a sense of loss, a going away.

He smiled to himself. It no longer mattered that he couldn’t remember everything.

Later that night he heard Tom Snyder ask someone: “What is your sexual preference?”

While he leaned against the wall, Kitty assaulted him again. Either she had been waiting for him, or she had left and thought of something else she had wanted to say and had come back.

“I just wanted to be sure you got one thing straight, big buddy.” She swung a purse, a kind of shoulder bag with a short strap. Had she had it earlier? Did she intend to hit him with it?

“What?” he said. From nearby rooms came the soft babble of TV sets tuned to different channels.

“When Allison goes back to Valleyhead, you are not to visit her. Do — you — understand — me?” With each word she jabbed him in the ribs with two fingers. There was a conjugal familiarity between them. He felt as if they had been married and divorced.

“Yes.”

“I know all about you and what’s wrong with you. You ought to be grateful you’re alive. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get your hands on my little girl or her property. And I don’t mind telling you I’m grateful they’re keeping you here.”

“They are?”

“Now hear this, mister. I’m making it my business to see to it that that child doesn’t spend another night in that dump of a greenhouse. Alistair will be here late this afternoon. He and I are going to pick her up. If she won’t go, the sheriff says all we got to do is call him and he’ll deliver her to Valleyhead. And you better believe for her sake I’d do it.”

“Alistair?”

“Dr. Duk.”

“Oh yes. Dr. Duk.”

“You know him? Isn’t he wonderful?”

He was silent.

“You’re going to pick her up this afternoon?” he asked her.

“You got it, buster.” She blinked and, relenting a little, leaned toward him. “Now don’t look so — everything’s going to be fine. Now we got that straight. Now let’s get you straight. Listen to me, Will.”

“Okay.”

“Leslie knows what she is doing, as usual. You’re in the right place. You just stay here and take care of yourself, take your medicine and you’ll be all right. Take care of these old folks — I understand you’re going to be in charge here.”

“I am?” There was the not unpleasant sense of great plans being made for him.

“You’ll do just fine. And we’re not exactly spring chickens ourselves.” She softened and gave him a different kind of poke in the ribs. “When you feel better, come take me for a ride. No, I’ll take you. We’ll park at the golf course and you can hug me up, remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Hugging me up on the golf course.”

“Ah — no.”

He looked at his watch. If he could get away from Kitty, there was time to catch the beginning of the Morning Movie, which this morning was King Solomon’s Mines, which was no great movie, true, but whose beginning, with Deborah Kerr and a saturnine Allan Quartermain played by Stewart Granger, he savored somewhat nevertheless. Deborah was trying to talk him into helping her find her husband in a remote unexplored country.

Strange. He had not spent a week at St. Mark’s and already he was looking forward to the Morning Movie.