The Second Coming

around, she was closer, her eyes full on him, large gray eyes set far apart in her pale (Yes, that was part of the oddness, not the thinness of her face but its pallor. Her skin was as white as a camellia petal yet not unhealthy) face. Her gaze was steady and unfocused. Either she was not seeing him (Was she blind? No, or she’d have never found the Hogan let alone the Spalding Pro Flite) or else she was seeing all of him because all at once he became aware of himself as she saw him, of his golf clothes, beltless slacks, blue nylon shirt with the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was he not she who was odd in this silent forest, he with his little iron club and nifty fingerless glove.
    Where had he seen her before? For one odd moment she was as familiar to him as he himself. He who remembered everything remembered those fond hazed eyes from Alabama twenty years ago. But maybe she wasn’t born then.
    Oh well. She was on something and couldn’t focus her eyes.
    He gave her the book. My God, what a nutty world, she zonked out on something, reading Rafael Sabatini and holed up alone in a ruined greenhouse, while grown middle-aged men socked little balls around a mountain meadow and hummed along in electric carts telling jokes about Jews and Germans and niggers. Atlanta and Carolina invaded by Arabs. No wonder my father wanted out.
    â€œAngry? No, I’m not angry. What did you mean by still angry?”
    â€œI mean over there.” She pointed to the chestnut fall. “Where you were standing.”
    She had been watching him.
    â€œWhy did you think I was angry?”
    â€œYou were holding your golf stick in the thicket. I wanted to give you back your little golf balls but I was instigated by fear. I thought you were going to hit someone. Or shoot.”
    â€œYou were watching me.”
    â€œYes.”
    He looked down at his hands gripping the club. He became aware that he was nodding.
    â€œYou look angry again.”
    â€œI didn’t know anyone was watching me.”
    â€œWhy did that make you angry? I wasn’t spying or denying. I was afraid.”
    Again the slow scanning speech. He looked at her. Yes, she was on something.
    Maybe they’re better off, after all. At least they are unburdened by the past. They don’t remember anything because there is nothing to remember. They crawl under the nearest bush when they’re tired, they eat seeds when they’re hungry, they pop a pill when they feel bad. Maybe it does come down to chemistry after all. But if it does, then he was right. He wouldn’t have it, the way they are, and though I wouldn’t have him, I won’t have it either.
    Already walking out of the woods, he had forgotten her but only after remembering that there was something familiar about the way her upper lip had a little down and was shortened, pulled up in a gentle arc just clear of the lower in a pert familiar way out of keeping with her soft dazed eyes. Passing through the glade he swung the three-iron at the skunk cabbages, clipping the fat little purple pods as neatly as he had hit the Pro Flite with the two-iron.
    Strange: he was slicing his drives from a proper tee with a proper fairway before him and hitting his irons like Hogan, from the rough, in the woods, behind trees. He shot better in a fen than in a fairway.
    As he climbed through the fence and walked toward the clubhouse, it occurred to him that for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, he knew exactly what was what and what he intended to do. He remembered everything. He fell down again but not seriously, springing up immediately and hardly missing a step. Had the girl seen him fall?
    It did not end quite as I expected, he thought, with a smile, as the poker dice rattled in the leather cup. His good friends greeted him in the fragrant and cheerful little locker-room bar. Towering above them in a great photomural, Jack Nicklaus blasted out of a sand trap, his good Ohio face as grim as a crusader, each airborne grain of sand sparkling like a jewel in the sunlight.
    It did not end quite as I expected but it did end and I did find out how it would end, he thought as a yellow eye gleamed at him. Jimmy Rogers took him by the flank and drew him close as a lover. Jimmy wanted to tell him a joke. I know what I must do.
    He listened calmly and even attentively. He remembered everything, even the