by Walker Percy
Yes sir. He waited only to be released from the hug.
There was silence. They spoke no more of it. We know, don’t we, the silence said, that the man was somehow wounded by the same shot and there is nothing to be said about it.
But how did he miss the bird? How did he wound himself?
While the sheriff was taking care of the man in the swamp, the guide brought the two shotguns, a dead quail, and three empty shells into the dark clean room smelling of coal oil and newspaper and flour paste where the Negro woman was washing his face. She dried it and patted something light and feathery—spiderwebs?—on his cheek. He didn’t feel bad but his ear still roared. “Here dey,” said the black youth. They yours and hisn. He looked down at the kitchen table at the two shotguns, the three empty Super-X shells, and the dead quail. This black boy was no guide. What guide would pick up empty shotgun shells? You didn’t see the other bird? he asked the guide. Ain’t no other bird, said the black boy. The white boy said: There were two singles and he shot twice and he never misses. The black boy said: Well he done missed this time. The white boy heard himself saying: You just didn’t find the bird, and getting angry and wondering: Why am I worrying about the second bird? Nawsuh, said the woman, whose black arms were sifted with flour. John sho find your bird if he was there. Look, he even found your bullets. Must have been the dogs got him.
He looked at the Greener on the kitchen table in the shotgun cabin, sat down, broke the breech, and took out the one empty shell and set it next to the shells the guide had found. As he gazed he put one hand to his cheek, which had begun to bleed again, and covered his roaring ear.
Now in a green forest glade near a pretty pink-and-green golf links, he touched his deafened ear. Did it still roar a little or was it the seashell roar of the silence of forest? Holding the three-iron in both hands he tested the spring of its steel shaft.
It was as if the thirty years had passed and he had not ever left the Negro cabin but, strange to say, had only now got around to saying what he had not said for thirty years. Again he smelled the close clean smell of kerosene and warm newspaper.
Now in Carolina in a glade in the white pines he said aloud: There was only one shell in the Greener, for some reason smiling a little and examining the three-iron closely as if it had a breech which could be broken, revealing the missing shell. But he only saw the green Winchester Super-X with its slightly wrinkled cylinder smelling of cordite. What happened to the other shell? Nothing. There was no other shell. I broke the breech of the Greener and there was only one shell. Why? Because he reloaded after the first shot. He shot the first single. Then there was a pause. It was then that I heard the geclick of the Greener breech opening and the gecluck of its closing. But why reload with one good shell left? That was all he needed for the second single if I missed it. Because he always liked to be ready. He liked to shoot quick and on the rise. And why, after the second shot, did he reload with only one shell?
Because—He smiled at the three-iron which he held sprung like a bow in front of him.
Because when he reloaded the last time, he knew he only needed one shot.
But why reload at all? He had reloaded before the second shot. After the second shot, he still had a good shell in the second chamber.
Wait a minute. Again he saw the sun reflected from something beyond the chestnut deadfall.
What happened? Here’s what happened.
He fired once at the first single. Geclick. Eject one shell and replace it. Gecluck.
He fired the second time at the second single and also hit me. Geclick. Reload. Gecluck.
Why reload if he knew he only needed one more shot? He still had a good shell in the second chamber.
In the Carolina pine forest he closed his eyes and saw green Super-X shells lined up on the clean quilt in the Negro cabin.
There were four shells.
Faraway the golfers were shouting, their voices blowing away like me killdeer on the high skyey fairways. It was close and still in the glade. He was watching the three-iron as, held in front of him like a divining rod, it sank toward the earth. Ah, I’ve found it after all. The buried treasure, he draught smiling.
Strange to say, there rose in his throat the same sweet terror he had felt long ago when his father’s old bitch Maggie (not the sorry pointer dog his father shot at Thomasville) pointed, bent like a pin, tail quivering, and they went slowly past her to kick up the covey, knowing as certainly as you can know anything that any second it would happen again, the sudden irruption at one’s very feet, the sudden heart-stop thunder from the very earth where one stood.
Ah then, so that was it. He was trying to tell me something before he did it. Yes, he had a secret and he was trying to tell me and I think I knew it even then and have known it ever since but now I know that I know and there’s a difference.
He was trying to warn me. He was trying to tell me that one day it would happen to me too, that I would come to the same place he came to, and I have, I have just now, climbing through a barbed-wire fence. Was he trying to tell me because he draught that if I knew exactly what happened to him and what was going to happen to me, that by the mere telling it would not then have to happen to me? Knowing about what is going to happen is having a chance to escape it. If you don’t know about it, it will certainly happen to you. But if you know, will it not happen anyway?
2
On the first nine, his slices had carried him along the backyards of the new condominiums and villas which bordered the golf links. The condominiums were like separate houses of different colors and heights which had been shoved together, some narrow with steep roofs, some broad and balconied like chalets.
Youngish couples, perhaps weekenders from Atlanta, sat drinking and barbecuing under the pines. They did not seem to notice him as he pursued his ball through their backyards. Two young men, both thick-waisted, both mustachioed like Mexican bandits, Atlantans yes, stood gazing down at smoking briquets in an orange tub-shaped grill as he retrieved his Spalding Pro Flite.
He sliced into a pond. He sliced over a creek. He sliced into a patio party of more Atlantans. He sliced clean off the golf course, across a new highway. There were a few small flat-topped houses scattered among vacant treeless lots. A man was washing a camper. It had a Pennslyvania license. An old couple stood at the roadside, binoculars in hand, as if they were waiting for a bird. In the distance above scrubby pines rose a dark pyramid-shaped building with a lopped-off peak like a Hawaiian temple.
Though he’d have preferred walking or riding with Lewis Peckham, Jimmy Rogers insisted on renting a third golf cart and driving him around in pursuit of his errant drives.
Jimmy Rogers told him several jokes. He noticed that Jimmy would discuss various matters such as financial deals, real estate developments, as they sat side by side bouncing along in the cart, but that he would only tell a joke after they dismounted to make their shots. Then it was possible for Jimmy to confront him and, standing not more than a foot away, take hold of his arm and engage him with his eyes. As he listened to a joke, Jimmy’s gaze fixed intently on him, darting ever so slightly. Jimmy seemed to be requiring something of him.
When Jimmy told him the following joke, seizing his arm and pulling him close, the sensation of Jimmy’s eyes darting over his face was not altogether unpleasant. It reminded him of the touch of a doctor’s hands examining his body.
Three women died and went to heaven.
The first, a white woman about fifty, arrived at the pearly gates. St. Peter asked her what she died of. She replied cancer of the breast. What a shame, said St. Peter, to be cut off from life in your prime but don’t worry, daughter, you have arrived in heaven where eternal happiness awaits you. And he welcomed her in.
Then came the second woman, also white, but younger, about thirty-five. Again St. Peter expressed sorrow and asked her the cause of her death. She said it was leukemia. Again he said what a shame it was that one should die so young but that her eternal reward awaited
her and so forth and told her to come in and take her place.
The third woman was a young black girl about eighteen. This time St. Peter expressed not only sympathy but shock that one so young should have died. What did you die of, daughter? Gonorrhea, said the black girl. Come on now, girl, how could that be? People don’t die of gonorrhea. And the girl said: They does when they gives it to Leroy.
During the joke he was aware of Jimmy’s casting about for slightly different ways of saying the same thing: “what a shame” and “expressed sorrow” and “expressed sympathy,” “welcomed her in” and “told her to come in.” Sometimes Jimmy filled in the blanks by saying “and so forth.” As the joke approached its end, Jimmy’s grip on his arm tightened and Jimmy’s gaze seemed to dart deep into his eye like the ray of a doctor’s examining scope.
Back at the cart Jimmy began to describe a real estate venture, an island off the South Carolina coast in which he and Bert Peabody—your brother-in-law, Billy—had an interest. Two Atlanta banks had made strong commitments and a personal friend, Ibn Saroud, had already put up one mill five.
“We’re going to close this mother out next week.”
“Ibn Saroud?” he repeated absently. Arabs in North Carolina. What had happened to the Jews? When the Jews appeared in history, Marion said, it was a sign. But what if they disappeared?
As Jimmy stopped the cart at his ball, which lay tree-bound in the rough and a good hundred and eighty yards from the green, the famous sixth, a swatch of billiard-table baize jutting above a neck of gold trees along a creek, a battlement from which a tiny pennant flew, ravined in front, and moated clean around by sand. A wind was blowing in gusts off the scarred mountain and into his face. As he looked at his irons he was thinking that it was the same warm wind which blew up the gorge and into Lost Cove cave and through thirty or forty miles of cool wet rock.
“A really fascinating person and a close personal friend. He speaks ten languages. Do you know how he brought me the money?”
“No.”
“In a satchel! Like a fucking Fullerbrush man. What I’m telling you is that this sapsucker walks in with this satchel, opens it up, and there’s the one mill five in fifties. I don’t bat an eye. All I say is, Hold it, Ibn, till I get my own satchel. He liked that.”
As Jimmy watched him from the cart, he gazed from the ball to the tree to the ravine to the green to the moon-faced mountain. The tree made a perfect stymie. Again he decided that something was happening to him. It took an effort to follow Jimmy’s jokes and his plans for the island with its marina, its houses and condominiums invisible from the beach, its Championship Wilderness Golf Course. What plans! Jimmy was all plans and schemes and deals. Even his jokes were plans. When Jimmy told him a joke, what he heard was not the joke but the plan and progress of the joke. There was this German and this Jew and this nigger on this airplane, said Jimmy, and he could only watch and wonder how Jimmy would fare with his joke, his Arab, and his island—each a little foray into the future. Why would anyone want to make such plans now? He could not. He could not bring himself to tell a joke or even to consider that he had another twelve holes of golf to play. As for planning the next shot, he had no idea whether he would hit the ball three feet or three hundred feet. Did it matter?
The tree was a maple, and though it stymied him, the trunk was slender and the branches came off high enough to shoot under them with a long iron. His lie wasn’t bad. Though the ball lay in the rough, it lay lightly and with a good cushion under it. He took out his two-iron and made his only good shot of the day. Closing the face of the club a little and opening his right hand on the grip, he hooked around the tree, caught the ball with the sweet spot of the iron, so that there was the sensation in his hands not of having hit anything but of a clicking through the ball as if he had tripped a switch. The ball took off low, turned like a boomerang, and as it went high over the ravine of gold trees caught a gust and settled like a bird on the tiny green.
There is a kind of happiness in golf, he thought, still feeling the sweetness of the shot in his hands and arms. Look at Bertie. He lives for nothing but to break a hundred, works on his game the livelong day, yet when he hits the ball, he looks like a man having a seizure. Nevertheless, wasn’t Bertie a lucky man?
“You’re going to like that one,” said Jimmy Rogers absently and not paying attention. “I only wish I could offer you a piece of the action on my island.”
“What action? What island?” Jimmy had forgotten golf and he had forgotten the island.
“Bert wants in and I’ve promised him though it was all I could do to talk that mother Ibn into letting him have a little piece of it. But there is something you might want to do.”
“There is?”
“Not for me. Not even for Bert. But for an old friend of yours.”
“Who’s that?”
“Katherine.”
“Katherine?”
“Katherine Vaught Huger.”
“Oh, Kitty.”
Jimmy’s arm, which had been stretched along the back of the seat, turned and his thumbnail touched him between the shoulder blades. It was a meaningful thrust signifying something about Kitty. They were rolling down the sunny fairway, the electric cart humming sociably. Jimmy gazed fondly ahead, eyes crinkled, as if they were old friends.
“Yes, it’s Katherine’s island and she has a little problem that only you as an old friend can help her with. Those are her words. She’ll be waiting for us. Your daughter Leslie was gracious enough to ask me over for a drink. Actually she said I was to get you home by five, and I’m not about to get in trouble with those two gals.”
They were not exactly old friends, though Jimmy seemed to know more about him than he knew himself. He, Jimmy, knew about his old girlfriend, his wife’s death, his money, his wife’s money, his brother-in-law’s money, his honorary degree, his man-of-the-year award.
When he first spied Jimmy headed for the foursome, ambling along in his perky way, hands moving around in his pockets, elbows sticking out, head cocked, pale narrow face keen as a knife, one eye had gleamed at him past the rim of his hollow temple.
That eye had gleamed at him for years, not frequently and in unlikely places. Somewhere, sometime, that eye would gleam at him again. No matter when and where it happened, however unlikely the place, it never came as a surprise. Each time it was as if he had caught a glimpse of himself, a narrow keener cannier self, in a mirror.
Did he imagine it or hadn’t that eye gleamed at him once in Long Island City years ago when he had had a wreck driving into Manhattan from the North Shore? And found himself sitting on a curb outside a Queens Boulevard bar & grill, shaken up and therefore vulnerable to the stares of passersby and also open to chance happenings. At such times, he had noticed, coincidences occur. They not only occur, they are called for. If one gets wounded in a war and is lying shot up in a ditch and J. B. Ellis, whom one had known years ago in Birmingham, shows up, who would be surprised?
Lives are lines of force which ordinarily run parallel and do not connect. But that day Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had had a wreck. Lifelines were bent. He sat embarrassed and bloody on a Queens Boulevard curbstone while bar-&-grill types came and went, looming hungrily above him, consuming him, eating him with their gazes, then back to the bar to gaze at Kennedy lying in a hotel pantry—a feast of gazing! What was more natural than that in the crowd of onlookers he should catch a familiar gleam of eye like himself looking at himself—Jimmy Rogers! What was more natural than that Jimmy Rogers should be living in Long Island City and doing PR for Long Island University? Jimmy rescued him from the feasting crowd, took him in, and was kind to him, sent him on his way. Kennedy was killed. Lines of force were bent. It was natural on such a day to have a wreck and see Jimmy Rogers.
Perhaps, he thought, even God will manifest himself when you are bent far enough out of your everyday lifeline.
Now here was Jimmy Rogers again. Had something happened? Was something about to happen?
As assassination was imminent.
There was something both mysterious and unadmirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers. They had come from the same town but had not known each other well. Jimmy’s father was a butcher. They attended the same university, where he but not Jimmy had joined a good fraternity, a small band of graceful Virginians and Northerners who wore their pants high, did not talk loud, or vomit when they drank. Over the years he had had not much to do with Jimmy. They spoke when they met on campus paths. He knew now that he had been snobbish toward Jimmy and that it could not be helped. Jimmy joined the Rho Omega Kappas, the Rocks, who wore sweaters under their double-breasted suits and showed too much gum when they smiled.
He had not been admirable in his dealings with Jimmy Rogers.
