The Second Coming

mule and he’ll talk your ear off.”
    â€œHow long have you been here?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Ryan.
    â€œTwo years.”
    â€œHow about Mr. Arnold?”
    â€œAsk him.”
    â€œThree 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.”
    â€œTheir 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?
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œAre you a builder?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Arnold.
    â€œHe once built a log cabin,” said Mr. Ryan. “But now by the time he finished the cabin the owners would have passed.”
    â€œAnybody 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.
    â€œSure 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.”
    â€œYou build log cabins?” he asked Mr. Arnold.
    â€œI can notch up a house for you,” said Mr. Arnold to Rose Marie holding her rose.
    â€œIf you live long enough,” said Mr. Ryan. They all watched TV in silence.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œTell him about using hog blood and horsehair in the red-clay chinking,” said Mr. Ryan.
    â€œHow much can you build a cabin for?” he asked Mr. Arnold.
    â€œI built a four-room house with a creek-rock chimley for Roy Price down in Rabun County for two hundred and fifty dollars.”
    â€œThat was in nineteen-thirty for Christ’s sake,” said Mr. Ryan.
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œLook out, potner,” said Mr. Arnold, grabbing him with his good hand, which was surprisingly strong.
    â€œYou all right, Mr. Barrett?” said Mr. Ryan.
    â€œI’m fine.”
    â€œSure you are. You gon be out of here in no time, ain’t he, Erroll?”
    â€œSho,” 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.
    â€œYeah,” 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