The Second Coming

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Book: The Second Coming by Walker Percy Read Free Book Online
Authors: Walker Percy
Tags: Fiction
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Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one’s very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds. One is punished on the spot. When his third drive dropped fair, he was lying seven.
    It had been bad enough to begin with that he couldn’t play with his regular foursome. For more than a week, his daughter’s future father-in-law, a seven-foot Californian, had taken the place of Slocum McKeon, a local attorney and excellent golfer, a taciturn unambitious intelligent man who knew how to be both distant and amiable. To make matters worse, who should show up today but his brother-in-law Bertie, a benumbed addled aging New Yorker with no feel for the game or its etiquette, the sort who will drive into other players and fuddle on his way like Mr. Magoo, noticing nothing. This meant he couldn’t play with Dr. Vance Battle, the happiest man he knew, a young husky competent G.P. who liked to get his hands on you, happy as a vet with his fist up a cow, mend bones, take hold of your liver from the front and back, stick a finger up your anus paying no attention to your groans, talking N.C. basketball all the while, pausing only to frown and shake his head at the state of one’s prostate: “It feels like an Idaho potato.”
    The last time his foursome played, he fell down. Vance grabbed him and squinted at him. “You better come in, Will. I want to take a look at you.”
    As if this weren’t bad enough, Bertie shows up with Jimmy Rogers, an old con man from the campus, an unwelcome wraith from the past, a classmate who had got blackballed even by the Betas. Who, what brought this pair together?
    Maybe Vance was right. Something was happening to him.
    A few minutes earlier, on number-sixteen green, he had suffered another little spell and had fallen down in the deep trap behind number-sixteen green. But he had gotten up quickly and no one had noticed. His brother-in-law was lining up a putt, crouched over his putter with its gimmicky semicircular head, elbows sticking out, right foot drawn back daintily. Though the sun shone brightly, the green seemed suddenly to grow dark as if the daylight had drained down the hole. The other players, waiting in silence for the putt, grew taller. After the putt Jimmy Rogers took his arm and drew close and said Hail Caesar and he said Hail Caesar? and Jimmy Rogers said You really did it, didn’t you? and he said Did what? And Jimmy said You picked up all the marbles, that’s all. You married one of them and beat them at their own game in their own ball park. Them? Who’s them? Yankees? What game? Practicing law? Making money?
    But then Jimmy drew close and looked solemn.
    â€œI’m so sorry, old buddy.”
    â€œSorry about what?”
    â€œYour wife’s passing.”
    â€œOh. Thank you.”
    â€œWhat a wonderful person she must have been.”
    â€œYes, she was.”
    Jimmy Rogers began to tell him a joke about a Jew and a German and a black on an airplane with a single parachute. A high-pitched keening filled the sky. Am I going crazy? he wondered curiously. Earlier he had seen a bird, undoubtedly some kind of a hawk, fly across the fairway straight as an arrow and with astonishing swiftness, across a ridge covered by scarlet and gold trees, then fold its wings and drop like a stone into the woods. It reminded him of something but before he could think what it was, sparks flew forward at the corner of his eye. He decided with interest that something was happening to him, perhaps a breakdown, perhaps a stroke. When his turn came to putt and he stooped over the ball, he looked at the hole some twenty feet away and at Lewis

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