The Second Coming

simple as the shotgun beside him?
    â€œWhat?” He gave a start. The chaplain was saying something.
    â€œI said when I come over tomorrow, perhaps you and I and Leslie can have a little powwow. About this ah do-it-yourself wedding.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œI want to get your old friend Mrs. Huger in on it too. I have a feeling she can handle Leslie. She’s quite a lady.”
    He was looking down at his hand. A shaft of light struck it. The yellow light, refracted by the prism, shaded into blue and red on his skin like a bruise. It was still possible to feel the buck of the Luger in the bones of his wrist.
    â€œYou’re so lucky Mrs. Huger turned up when she did, Will. You’ve no idea how helpful she’s been. Isn’t she an old flame of yours? She’s a doll. Did you know she’s my main contact with Leslie and the groom’s family? Why is it women know so much more than we do?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMrs. Huger. Your old—”
    Oh, Kitty. Kitty Vaught Huger. My old flame. What in hell was Kitty doing up here? She and her grinning dentist-husband. They were everywhere, all over the golf course and in his house. Kitty had a woman’s managerial way with her. For a fact she had been helpful. Even Yamaiuchi liked her. Last Saturday when the Cupps flew in from California she and Yamaiuchi had fixed the hors d’oeuvre. What did she want? What did her husband want? Like many people who want something, he had a way of coming at you from the side and grinning back to his eyeteeth. Both came closer than people usually do. When they greeted you, they fell forward and laid hands on you. When Kitty touched him, he felt showers of gooseflesh but not exactly excitement. It was the sort of gooseflesh you feel when a child, not knowing about such things, puts his hands on you.
    Kitty had changed. When he thought of her, he thought of sitting next to her in the Alabama twilight in her father’s Lincoln, her knees together, eyes cast down, silent; crossing lonesome red-clay railroad cuts filled with ironweed and violet light. But now she came shouldering up to him. She was bolder, lustier, better-looking but almost brawny, a lady golfer, brown and freckle-shouldered. Her voice was deeper, a musical whiskey-mellowed country-club voice with a laugh he didn’t remember. When she sat, she straddled good-naturedly, opening her knees. When she leaned toward him, her heavy gold jewelry clunked.
    He was sitting in the Mercedes looking at the Luger. It was getting dark. A few old people were in the Kennedy rockers on the front porch, but most were inside watching giant-screen TV. Mr. Arnold, one of Marion’s patients who had come to the house, spied him and tried to say something, but one side of his face was pulled down and his lips blew out like a curtain. One hand was fisted and held close, cradled like a baby by the other arm.
    The Luger felt good. Its weight and ugliness and beauty made him smile. He shook his head fondly. Why did he feel good? Was it because for the first time in his life he could suddenly see what had happened to his father, exactly where he was right and where he was wrong? Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don’t have to and I won’t. Right, old mole, and if you were here in rich reborn Christian Carolina with its condos and 450 SELs and old folks rolling pills and cackling at Hee Haw, you wouldn’t put up with that either.
    Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn’t even look. That’s the difference between us. I’m going to find out once and for all. You never even looked.
    Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?
    He hefted the Luger. His father took it off an SS colonel, it and the colonel’s black cap with its Totenkopf insignia and some photographs—his father: a captain in the 10th Armored Division, which joined Patton at Saarburg, where he, his father, had his picture taken standing up in the hatch of an M4 Sherman tank, which did not look at all like the snapshot of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank taken in the Ardennes (even though I somehow know it was exactly what he, my father, had