The Second Coming

back.
    â€œI 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?
    â€œWhat?” he said. From nearby rooms came the soft babble of TV sets tuned to different channels.
    â€œWhen 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.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œThey are?”
    â€œNow 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.”
    â€œAlistair?”
    â€œDr. Duk.”
    â€œOh yes. Dr. Duk.”
    â€œYou know him? Isn’t he wonderful?”
    He was silent.
    â€œYou’re going to pick her up this afternoon?” he asked her.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œLeslie 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.”
    â€œI am?” There was the not unpleasant sense of great plans being made for him.
    â€œYou’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?”
    â€œRemember what?”
    â€œHugging me up on the golf course.”
    â€œAh—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.

V
    A PRINCELY BLACK WATUSI who looked seven feet tall stood on a rock holding a staff and gazing to the north. Somewhere beyond lay the treasures of King Solomon.
    On one side of him sat Mr. Ryan, on the other Mr. Arnold. There had been time to prop Mr. Ryan in a wheelchair and push him to the game room with its forty-five-inch giant-screen Sony projector TV. He had invited Mr. Arnold to come along. Mr. Arnold had said nothing but trudged dutifully alongside Mr. Ryan’s chair after tucking a blanket around him lest he topple forward.
    â€œThat’s the biggest nigger I ever saw,” said Mr. Ryan, gazing at the majestic Watusi. “But I can tell you one thing. That ain’t no African chief. That’s a blue-gum nigger from Mississippi. I’d know them anywhere. I had them working for me in crews building condos from Point Clear to Sea Island. They used to be good workers till Roosevelt ruined them.”
    Mr. Arnold stirred in his chair. The curtain of his face lifted a little. Leaning out and looking back, good eye winking, he spoke not to Mr. Ryan but to Barrett in the middle. “I’m here to tell you that Roosevelt was the onliest one ever done anything for us pore folks up in the hills.”
    The old men began to argue about Roosevelt, who had been dead for thirty-five years.
    â€œOkay, hold it,” he said and the two men subsided in