The Second Coming

a brand-new place in Carolina—the cat was exactly a hundred percent cat, no more no less. As for Will Barrett, as for people nowadays—they were never a hundred percent themselves. They occupied a place uneasily and more or less successfully. More likely they were forty-seven percent themselves or rarely, as in the case of Einstein on the streetcar, three hundred percent. All too often these days they were two percent themselves, specters who hardly occupied a place at all. How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?
    There was his diagnosis, then. A person nowadays is two percent himself. And to arrive at a diagnosis is already to have anticipated the cure: how to restore the ninety-eight percent?
    Perhaps it is not necessary to say any more about Will Barrett’s peculiar revelation, except to note that if it applied to anyone it applied to him and not to the good folk of Linwood, North Carolina, who, sitting in their sunny patios, did in fact seem happy as cats on this beautiful October Sunday.
    At any rate, as he absently climbed out of the Mercedes, Luger forgotten but still in hand, he was musing over his discovery of this strange shortfall of the human condition and had no sooner reached the middle of the garage on his way to the interior door than whangEEEEE the concrete erupted, spat, stung his calf. There followed not in succession but all at once, it seemed, the sound of the shot, a sharp sting, and the solid thunk in the brick.
    Then—and now occurred the most remarkable part of this odd episode—in the next instant he was transformed. It was as if the sting in his calf had been the injection of a powerful drug. Quicker than any drug, in the instant in fact of hearing and recognizing the gunshot, he was, as he expressed it, miraculously restored to himself. The cat of course had jumped four feet straight up and fled in terror, as any sensible animal would, reduced instantly to zero percentile of its well-being. But Barrett?
    The missing ninety-eight percent is magically restored! How? By the rifle shot! In the very same motion of lifting his stinging leg, he is diving for the floor, hitting the concrete in a roll, shoulder tucked, Luger cradled in his stomach. He rolls over at least three times, enough rolls anyhow to carry him under the high-slung 1956 Silver Cloud and against the far wall, where now he is feeling himself to be himself for the first time in years, flanked as he is by two adjoining walls, the Rolls above him as good as a pillbox affording a slot-shaped view of the sunny woods. And without his taking thought about it, the Luger is now held in both hands stretched out in front of him as steady as if it were propped on a sandbag.
    Were terrorists after him? A kneecapping? Or just shooting up a rich man’s house and Rolls? Or were they after his daughter Leslie, upstairs?
    None of the above, as it turned out. In another minute he had caught sight of an oddly shaped peak of a red cap disappearing in the pines, not a deer hunter’s cap but a Texaco or Conoco (he forgot which) mechanic’s cap; he recognized the cap wearer and knew who fired the shot and why. It was Ewell McBee, a covite from the valley below, once his wife’s family’s gardener, who poached for deer in Barrett’s ten thousand acres of mountainside.
    No apocalyptic last-days irruption of terrorism then, no more than the annual unpleasantness with McBee. No, maybe a bit more: wasn’t McBee saying in fact, maybe you’d better let me poach so I won’t make the mistake of shooting up your garage?
    He sighed: he’d rather an Italian terrorist than the complex negotiations with McBee (pay him a call? let him poach? call the sheriff? buy him a drink? shoot him?). At any rate, don’t tell Leslie.
    There he lay for some minutes, sighting down the Luger and speculating on the odd upsidedownness of the times, that on a beautiful Sunday in old Carolina, it takes a gunshot to restore a man to himself.
    What man? How many men besides Will Barrett would have shared his feelings? How many men would have felt better for being shot at on a peaceful Sunday? Very few white folks and no niggers at all, as they say in old Carolina.
    Even Barrett wondered. Why is it that I know perfectly well that it was Ewell McBee, that it was an accident, and that I am disappointed? How does it happen that this is what I do best and feel best doing, not hitting a