The Second Coming

shotgun.” He noticed absently that it had become possible to tell the truth, that it was no longer necessary to make an excuse, go fix a drink.
    â€œWhat are you going to do, shoot us?” asked Kitty with a mock falling away. She told the others: “He was always like that, ready to have a shoot-out if somebody crossed him, right here and now.”
    No, I wasn’t always like that.
    â€œThat was the way it was where we came from, wasn’t it, Will?”
    â€œI was going to look for an old shotgun that belonged to my father and grandfather.”
    â€œYou didn’t mess with them either,” Kitty told the others. “Where we came from, if you fell out with somebody, you didn’t smile at them and go around behind their backs. You called them out and had it out with them.”
    That’s right. We call ourselves out and have it out with ourselves. Famous one-man shoot-outs.
    â€œI keep a shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot under my bed,” said the grinning dentist-husband. “I fixed a rack just inside the rail. All I got to do is reach down with one hand. Just let some sapsucker come in the door or window. Just let him come. I know a man, a substantial man no redneck, who just the other day bought a shotgun and a .357 Magnum and two cases of shells, and he’s a college graduate, not one of your nuts.”
    The grin, he noticed, went back to the eyeteeth. What’s this guy so angry about? His wife? Being a dentist? His daughter? No wonder his daughter’s nuts. Who does he want to shoot? Probably niggers.
    â€œSpeaking of the Wild West, guns, and shoot-outs,” said Jimmy Rogers, coming even closer, close as a lover, and, putting his head down in their midst, told them one of his jokes.
    Though he tried to listen to the joke, his mind wandered. Jimmy pulled him close and then gave him a final little tug. The joke must be over. “I have to go,” he said.
    â€œHold on, son,” said Kitty, but it was she who held on, laughing and grabbing his arm with both hands, wrists all aglint and ajangle with gold. There was about her a rushing way he didn’t remember of coming close and pushing ahead of her the smell of her hair and a perfume—Shalimar? How did he remember after all these years? It smelled like Shalimar sounded—and a friendly kind of jostling, jostling him with arm, shoulder, elbow, hip, hair swinging past the hollow of his throat. What he did remember, not he but his body, was the warmth in the places where she touched him. It was curious. Spots she touched grew warm as if he had had a positive skin test. His antibodies remembered her body. “Hold it, son. I need to have a word with you.” Curious! Something was both strange and familiar. Suddenly he realized he had not thought about women for a long time, not since Marion’s death, not since long before Marion’s death—except for the time he thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fell down in a bunker. For three years he had lived in a dream of golf and good works.
    â€œWhat?” he said, turning an ear down to her upraised face. She wanted to whisper something. The Arabs fell back, stopped smiling, bent forward in a huddle, made plans.
    â€œLook, Will. The summerhouse is lost in the cloud.”
    â€œYes, it is.”
    â€œDo you realize what happened to us?”
    â€œNo, what?”
    â€œWe passed each other like ships in a fog. I was a fool. I should have grabbed you when I could.”
    â€œAs it has turned out, I don’t think—”
    â€œLet’s go get lost in the fog,” she whispered. She couldn’t quite whisper but like a child trying to whisper sputtered in his ear. His hair raised. He nodded.
    â€œCould you meet me in the summerhouse?” she asked. “I have a bug to put in your ear.”
    Welts sprang out on his neck.
    â€œThere’s something I have to do.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI have to find the shotgun.”
    â€œI don’t mean now. I mean after dinner. After the others leave. Is there a side door?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’ll go out the front door to get a breath of air. You go a different way. You’re always dropping out anyway. You know what Marion said about you?”
    â€œNo, what?”
    â€œYou were just not there half the time. But what she didn’t understand, and what you and I do, is that now and then you and I just have to drop out,