The Second Coming

a bad sleepless night in an old hotel (the same hotel where the man had spent the night before the great Thomasville hunt). The hotel was not at all as the man had remembered it.
    Here, said the man, handing him the shotgun and stretching up the top strand of barbed wire. The wire creaked. I trust you now.
    Thank you. The boy was watchful as he took the gun.
    Do you trust me? asked the man.
    Yes. No.
    You have to trust me now.
    Why?
    I’m going to see to it that you’re not going to have to go through what I am going through.
    What’s that?
    You’ll just have to trust me, okay?
    Okay, said the boy, eyes wary and watchful. The man sounded almost absentminded and his glittering eye seemed to cast beyond him to the future, perhaps to the lawsuit Monday.
    Come over here a minute.
    What?
    Here. Over here by me.
    Oh.
    Now, as the boy stood beside him, the man gave him a hug with the arm not holding the gun. He felt the man’s hand giving him hard regular pats on the arm. He was saying something. The boy, no longer surprised, did not quite hear because he was reflecting on the strangeness of it, getting an awkward hug from his father, as they stood side by side in their bulky hunting clothes in the wet cold funk-smelling pin-oak swamp. He couldn’t remember being hugged before except at funerals and weddings, and then the hugs were perfunctory and the kisses quick cheek kisses and that was all right with him, he didn’t want to be hugged or kissed then or now.
    And now, standing in the glade with the three-iron, he was wondering idly. Why? Why is it that I would not wish then or now or ever to kiss my father? Why is it that it was then and now a kind of violation, not the violation of the man grabbing him across the fence but a violation nevertheless, and a cheapening besides. Italians and Frenchmen and women hugged and kissed each other and what did it signify?
    What? asked the boy.
    The man pulled him close and turned his face down toward him and the boy smelled the heavy catarrh of his breath with the faint overlay of whiskey from the night before. His father was understood to suffer from “catarrh” and all night long, while the boy lay still, watchful and alert, the man had tossed and breathed out his heavy catarrh-and-whiskey breath.
    Two singles went in here. I’ll take one and you the other. But the man didn’t let him go, held him still and gave him regular hard pats.
    The man liked to go after singles after the covey was flushed, veering from the fields and open woodlands which the dogs had quartered and plunge backward into thickets and briars where not even the dogs would go, turning and using his body as entering wedge, the vines singing and popping against the heavy duck of his pants and jacket. When a single got up and he shot it and found it (no thanks to the dogs), and held the bird in his hand for a moment before stuffing it into the game pocket, his eyes would grow merry as if he had set himself an impossible quest and won, had plunged into the heart of the darkness and disorder of the wet cold winter woods and extracted from it of all things a warm bright-eyed perfect bird.
    But now the man was standing still, eyes glittering, holding the gun oddly and gazing down at it, the stock resting on the ground, the barrel tilted just back from the vertical and resting lightly in the crotch of thumb and forefinger.
    You and I are the same, said the man as if he were speaking to the gun.
    How?
    You are like me. We are two of a kind. I saw it last night.
    Here come the pats again, hard, regular, slow, like a bell tolling.
    Saw what?
    I saw the way you lay in bed last night and slept or didn’t sleep. You’re one of us, I’m afraid. You already know too much. It’s too bad in a way.
    Us? Who’s us?
    You’d be better off if you were one of them.
    Who’s them?
    The ignorant armies that clash by night.
    The boy was silent.
    We have to trust each other now, don’t we?
    Yes, said the boy, rearing slightly so he could see the man better.
    We’re buddies, aren’t we?
    Yes. No. You’re wrong. We’re not buddies. I don’t want to be anybody’s buddy.
    Okay. Let’s go. There are two of them. You take the one on the right.
    Okay.
    Oh shit, said the man. Last hard pat, sock, wham, on the shoulder. I’m sorry.
    The boy looked up not surprised but curious. He had never heard the man say shit before.
    Now standing with the