The Second Coming

be?”
    â€œIt burned down years ago.”
    â€œIt all burned?”
    â€œThe main house. Must have been bums or hippies living out there. Ain’t nobody been out there for years.”
    â€œShow me how to get there.” After she said it, she realized she had said it. She had uttered not a question, not a statement, but a request. How long had it been since she had said to someone: Do this, do that? Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.
    â€œTake this trail.” The watch-glass nail glided, hesitated, then stopped like a Ouija in a white space. “It’s just the other side of the golf course.”
    â€œHow far is it from here?”
    â€œThree, four miles.”
    â€œDo you mind telling how old you are?” It would help if she knew whether he was forty-five or sixty-five. But he went on nodding and didn’t reply. Her question, she saw, was inappropriate, but he let it go.
    Instead he looked at her and said: “Are you going to stay out there?”
    â€œYes. It’s my place.”
    â€œBe careful, young lady.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œHippies and bums stay out there. Last summer a lady got—hurt. Just keep your eyes open.”
    â€œAll right.”
    He rose.
    â€œIt’s a nice walk. Have a nice day.”
    â€œWhat?” She was puzzled by the way he said it, in a perfunctory way like goodbye. But what a nice thing to say.
    But he only repeated it—“Have a nice day”—and raised a finger to the place where the brim of his hat would have been. He returned to his street corner.
    After marking the trail with her Scripto pencil and making an X in the blank space, she folded the map carefully with the marked trail on the outside and stuck it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Opposite the Gulf station she stopped and looked down at her boots. They felt stiff. She went into the rest room, tore three coarse tissues from the roll above the washbasin, put the toilet seat lid down, sat and took off her boots, removed the can of neat’s-foot oil from her knapsack and oiled her boots, using the entire can. Carefully she disposed of the oil-soaked paper and empty can. She washed and dried her hands.
    In the street her boots felt better, light and strong yet pliable as suede. There was a small pleasure too in getting rid of the can. She meant to live with very few things.
    Passing a drugstore window, she noticed a display of Timex wristwatches. Perhaps she should own a watch. Else how would one know when it was time to get up, eat meals, go to bed? Had there ever been a time in her life when she did not eat a meal when mealtime came? What if one did not? Who said one had to get up or eat meals at a certain time?
    After a moment she shrugged and shouldered her NATO knapsack, this time using both straps, and walked on. The distributed weight felt good on her shoulders. For the first time in her life, she felt that it, her life, was beginning.
    But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.

III
    UNDOUBTEDLY SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to him. It began again the next day when he sliced out-of-bounds and was stooping through the barbed-wire fence to find his ball. For the first time in his life he knew that something of immense importance was going to happen to him and that he would soon find out what it was. Ed Cupp was holding the top strand high so he could crawl through, higher than he needed to, to make up for his, Ed Cupp’s, not following him into the woods to help him find the ball. To prove his good intentions, Ed Cupp pulled the wire so hard that it stretched as tight as a guitar string and creaked and popped against the fence posts.
    As he stopped and in the instant of crossing the wire, head lowered, eyes slightly bulging and focused on the wet speckled leaves marinating and funky-smelling in the sunlight, he became aware that he was doing an odd thing with his three-iron. He was holding it in his left hand, fending against the undergrowth with his right and turning his body into the vines and briars which grew in the fence so that they snapped against his body. Then, even as he was climbing through, he had shifted his grip on the iron so that the club head was tucked high under his right arm, shaft resting on forearm, right hand holding the shaft steady—as one might carry a shotgun.
    He did not at first know why he did this. Then he did know why.
    Now he was standing