The Second Coming

left there, to find a place where something had happened to him. Or rather hadn’t happened to him. All these years he had thought he was in luck that it didn’t happen and that he had escaped with his life and a triumphant life at that. But it was something else he had escaped with, not his life. His life—or was it his death?—he had left behind in the Thomasville swamp, where it still waited for him. With a kind of sweet certainty he knew now that it was there that he would find it. Finding the post oak—he knew he could walk straight to it—and not coming out of the swamp at all was better man thrashing around these pretty mountains, playing in Scotch foursomes, crawling into caves, calling on God, Jews, and tigers. No, it was in Georgia that he would find it. And it was in Georgia that he would do it.
    But as he listened to the Associate talk about his work—talk with pleasure! he enjoyed his work! he enjoyed walking twenty blocks down West Peachtree, sitting behind his desk for ten hours, making loans, good loans! good for lender and lendee, doing isometrics between appointments, he was no loan shark!—his eye traveled along the ridge and came to a notch where in the darkness of the pine and spruce there grew a single gold poplar which caught the sun like a yellow-haired girl coming out of a dark forest. Once again his heart was flooded with sweetness but a sweetness of a different sort, a sharp sweet urgency, a need to act, to run and catch. He was losing something. Something of his as solid and heavy and sweet as a pot of honey in his lap was being taken away.
    â€œI’m not going back to Georgia,” he said, rising.
    â€œWhat’s that?” said the Associate quickly and in a changed voice (something was up) but making room for him with his knees.
    Already at the front of the bus—how did he get there?—he was tapping the driver’s shoulder, the driver a heavy uniformed man who looked like an aging airline pilot except that his fingernails were dirty and his face was sullen. His tanned neck had deep sharp hieroglyphs carved in it.
    â€œExcuse me, driver, but I want to get out.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œStop the bus. I want to get off.”
    â€œThis is an express, Mac. Next stop, Asheville.”
    â€œI said goddamn it stop the bus and let me off.”
    The driver went on driving the bus as if he weren’t there. Angry at the beginning, his face dark with blood, the driver seemed to grow angrier still. What was he angry about? Working conditions? Life at home?
    He leaned close to the driver. They both watched the pleasant road spinning under them. “If you don’t stop this fucking bus right now, I’m grabbing your ass out of that seat and stopping it for you.”
    The driver slowed. Well, he’s going to let me out, he thought. But no, it was in order to reach for a rack on the dash in front of him, and take out cards and pass them to the passengers behind him. “Please pass these along and fill them out. You are witnesses to a crime. This is a hijacking.”
    He looked at the four passengers on the front row of seats. They gazed straight ahead, faces like stone. Something is happening, their stricken expressions said, but it is happening too close. We do not know what to do. It was better not to look. But they took the cards dutifully and gazed at the scenery, not daring even to look at the cards.
    The bus was still going slow.
    â€œLet the man out. The man wants out.” It was the Associate, standing tall and reared, glasses flashing. He was not smiling. “You heard the man. He wants out.”
    â€œI’ll let him out all right,” said the driver, who in his rage had gone stupid and sought now only the ultimate gesture, the last one-up face-saver, to prove himself to himself and to the passengers, who watched stone-faced holding their legal cards as dutifully as TV game players. The door opened while the bus was still moving and in the moment of his stepping down the driver slammed on the brakes, slamming him forward into metal jamb, then started up rhhhooom, slamming him back into the other jamb not squarely but glancingly so that he was bounced out, which would not have been serious except that the door, itself now part of the driver’s stupidity and rage, was already closing and caught his foot, levering him down hard enough so that the next thing he knew, the pebbles of