The Second Coming

said: They does when they gives it to Leroy.
    During the joke he was aware of Jimmy’s casting about for slightly different ways of saying the same thing: “what a shame” and “expressed sorrow” and “expressed sympathy,” “welcomed her in” and “told her to come in.” Sometimes Jimmy filled in the blanks by saying “and so forth.” As the joke approached its end, Jimmy’s grip on his arm tightened and Jimmy’s gaze seemed to dart deep into his eye like the ray of a doctor’s examining scope.
    Back at the cart Jimmy began to describe a real estate venture, an island off the South Carolina coast in which he and Bert Peabody—your brother-in-law, Billy—had an interest. Two Atlanta banks had made strong commitments and a personal friend, Ibn Saroud, had already put up one mill five.
    â€œWe’re going to close this mother out next week.”
    â€œIbn Saroud?” he repeated absently. Arabs in North Carolina. What had happened to the Jews? When the Jews appeared in history, Marion said, it was a sign. But what if they disappeared?
    As Jimmy stopped the cart at his ball, which lay tree-bound in the rough and a good hundred and eighty yards from the green, the famous sixth, a swatch of billiard-table baize jutting above a neck of gold trees along a creek, a battlement from which a tiny pennant flew, ravined in front, and moated clean around by sand. A wind was blowing in gusts off the scarred mountain and into his face. As he looked at his irons he was thinking that it was the same warm wind which blew up the gorge and into Lost Cove cave and through thirty or forty miles of cool wet rock.
    â€œA really fascinating person and a close personal friend. He speaks ten languages. Do you know how he brought me the money?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIn a satchel! Like a fucking Fullerbrush man. What I’m telling you is that this sapsucker walks in with this satchel, opens it up, and there’s the one mill five in fifties. I don’t bat an eye. All I say is, Hold it, Ibn, till I get my own satchel. He liked that.”
    As Jimmy watched him from the cart, he gazed from the ball to the tree to the ravine to the green to the moon-faced mountain. The tree made a perfect stymie. Again he decided that something was happening to him. It took an effort to follow Jimmy’s jokes and his plans for the island with its marina, its houses and condominiums invisible from the beach, its Championship Wilderness Golf Course. What plans! Jimmy was all plans and schemes and deals. Even his jokes were plans. When Jimmy told him a joke, what he heard was not the joke but the plan and progress of the joke. There was this German and this Jew and this nigger on this airplane, said Jimmy, and he could only watch and wonder how Jimmy would fare with his joke, his Arab, and his island—each a little foray into the future. Why would anyone want to make such plans now? He could not. He could not bring himself to tell a joke or even to consider that he had another twelve holes of golf to play. As for planning the next shot, he had no idea whether he would hit the ball three feet or three hundred feet. Did it matter?
    The tree was a maple, and though it stymied him, the trunk was slender and the branches came off high enough to shoot under them with a long iron. His lie wasn’t bad. Though the ball lay in the rough, it lay lightly and with a good cushion under it. He took out his two-iron and made his only good shot of the day. Closing the face of the club a little and opening his right hand on the grip, he hooked around the tree, caught the ball with the sweet spot of the iron, so that there was the sensation in his hands not of having hit anything but of a clicking through the ball as if he had tripped a switch. The ball took off low, turned like a boomerang, and as it went high over the ravine of gold trees caught a gust and settled like a bird on the tiny green.
    There is a kind of happiness in golf, he thought, still feeling the sweetness of the shot in his hands and arms. Look at Bertie. He lives for nothing but to break a hundred, works on his game the livelong day, yet when he hits the ball, he looks like a man having a seizure. Nevertheless, wasn’t Bertie a lucky man?
    â€œYou’re going to like that one,” said Jimmy Rogers absently and not paying attention. “I only wish I could offer you a piece of the action on my