The Second Coming

the tiny waterfall. The dog rumbled and his spine hairs went stiff as boar bristles.
    The man was walking toward the greenhouse from the glade. His hands were in his pockets. Something in brown paper was tucked under his arm. The sunlight made a glint on a facet of his forehead and his brown hair, which had streaks on it. Was it turning gray or was it burnished and bleached by the sun? Was he gray-haired or a platinum blond? He was not good-looking. His eye sockets were too deep, his eyes too light, his mouth too grim, his skin burned too dark by the sun. Her father always smiled; he never smiled. A shadow like a German saber scar crossed one cheek. Today he was dressed differently. Instead of golf clothes, he wore an ordinary white shirt and ordinary pants. No, not ordinary. The shirt was tailored and had a soft rolled buttoned-down collar and the pants were narrow in the cuff and at least two inches above the dirty tennis shoes. Was he dressed carelessly as her father would dress if he put on shirt and pants on Saturday morning? No, he thought about how he would dress. The way he walked reminded her of the yachtsmen who stopped in Williamsport and strolled about town: not exactly ambling and not striking out, foot coming down heel first, but toed in, left shoulder coming forward with left leg. It was either a Northern walk or a yachting walk.
    Yes, that’s what he was, she thought watching him through the waterfall, a Northern millionaire with his platinum-streaked hair growing carelessly-carefully under and over the soft collar, who would spend a hundred dollars for corduroy pants so they would look uncreased and too small but too small in the right way not the wrong way like her father’s khakis, which made his stomach look too big, or Dr. Duk’s double knits, which were too tight in the crotch.
    Just as before, his head was turned slightly—was he listening for her in the greenhouse?—so that he faced her but did not see her though she was less than twenty feet away. Under the jut of his brow, his eyes were cast into deep shadow but as she watched they seemed to open and close, now shut and dark, now open and pale, like a trick picture of Jesus. Yes, it was a trick of light or of her own retina. She shut her eyes. The image of him went dark then bright with eye sockets like a skull.
    There at her door he stood in the same odd and absolute stillness, the same way she had seen him standing in the glade. Ha, what to do at a greenhouse door clearly full of nothing but plants? ring a doorbell? knock on glass? Yes, because he was lifting a hand to the door.
    Perhaps she had opened her mouth to say something or perhaps she had moved, but before she could do anything else and just as the man’s hand touched the house, the dog charged. The man had time to turn, it seemed to her slowly, the sunlight striking a different plane of his forehead, and held out his hand palm down to the dog. Too slowly it seemed to her: was this too part of his studied Northern nonchalance? No, because even now his eyes could not or would not focus on the dog. He didn’t care whether the dog bit him or not!
    It was not courage, not even inattention but rather, she saw, a kind of indifference yet a curiosity with it. Would the dog attack? Would tooth enter flesh? If it did, would it matter?
    The hand was held out like a piece of meat proffered by the man. It was easy to imagine him examining the wound as if it belonged to someone else.
    She hollering something, the bristle-backed dog charging flat out, past all snarling, and even as he took the hand in his mouth in the same instant fetched up stiff-legged, shoulders jutting up one then the other like a reined-in horse, sliding to a sit, pushed the hand out of his mouth with his tongue and cocked a yellow tufted eyebrow around but not quite to her. Embarrassed again.
    They watched as the dog settled his mouth and looked away. The man came over to the rock.
    â€œDid he stop because of my saying or because of your not saying?” asked the girl.
    â€œI’m not sure. Probably because of your saying. Would you give me a drink of water. I’ve had a long walk.”
    It was sweat, she saw, that made his hair and forehead shine.
    He followed her into the greenhouse. Without raising his head, he looked around, his lightish eyes moving in deep sockets. “It still smells like a greenhouse. Once I was in Cincinnati. I liked the smell of a greenhouse there so much