The Second Coming

not smiling and his eyes were closed but his face looked all right. His cheeks were still ruddy.
    He put his hand under the man’s jacket but the Greener got in the way. He pulled the shotgun out by the butt and put his hand under the jacket again and against the man’s chest. The heart beat strongly. But his hand was wet and something was wrong. The fabric of shirt and underwear was matted into flesh like burlap trodden into mud.
    Now squatting back on his heels beside the man he took his handkerchief from his pocket with his dry hand and carefully wiped the blood from the other hand. Then he pushed his cap back still farther because his forehead was sweating. He blew into both hands because they were cold and began to think.
    What he was thinking about was what he was going to do next but at the same time he noticed that he did not feel bad. Why is it, he wondered, that I feel that I have all the time in the world to figure out what to do and the freedom to do it and that what is more I will do it? It was as if he had contracted into the small core of curiosity and competence he had felt within himself after the man had grabbed him across the fence, spun him around, cursed him, and took his gun away. Now he was blowing into his hands and thinking: This is a problem and problems are for solving. All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it and a center to do it from. He had found his center.
    The guide doesn’t live far from here. We passed the cabin. The Negro boy ran home when the man cursed him and shot the dog.
    Now he was standing up and looking carefully around. He even made out a speckled quail lying in the speckled leaves. As he waited for the dizziness to clear, he watched the man.
    Don’t worry, I’m going to get us both out of here. He knew with certainty that he could.
    Later, after it was over, his stepmother had hugged them both. Thank God thank God thank God she said in her fond shouting style. You could have both been killed!
    So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true; one which his stepmother had put forward in the way that a woman will instantly and irresistibly construe the world as she will have it and in fact does have it so: that the man had had one of his dizzy spells—he knows with his blood pressure he shouldn’t drink and hunt!—and fell; that in falling he discharged the double-barrel, which wounded the boy and nearly killed the man. The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him. We can thank our lucky stars that this child had the sense and bravery to know what to do. And you a twelve-year-old-mussing up his hair in front in a way she thought of as being both manly and English— We’re so proud of you. My fine brave boy!
    But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.
    The boy and his father knew better. With a final hug after he was up and around and the boy had recovered, except for a perforated and permanently deafened left middle ear and a pocked cheek like a one-sided acne, the man was able to speak to him by standing in the kitchen and enlisting D’Lo the cook in the conversation and affecting a broad hunter’s lingo not at all like him: I’m going to tell yall one damn thing— Yall? He never said yall. Talking to D’Lo, who stood at the stove with her back to them? I’m getting rid of that savage. He nodded to the Greener on the pantry table. I had no idea that savage had a pattern that wide! So wide it knicked you—did you know that, D’Lo? Hugging the boy, he asked D’Lo. D’Lo must either have known all about it or, most likely, had not been listening closely, for she only voiced her routine but adequate hnnnonnhHM! Now ain’t that something else!— which was what the man wanted her to say because this was the man’s way of telling the boy, through D’Lo, what had happened and soliciting and getting her inattentive assent to the routineness and even inevitability of it. Such things happen! And I’ll tell you something else, the man told D’Lo. When a man comes to the point that all he can think about is tracking a bird and shuts everything out of his mind to the point of shooting somebody, it’s time to quit! D’Lo socked down grits spoon on