The Second Coming by Walker Percy Page B

was beginning.
    But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.

III
    UNDOUBTEDLY SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to him. It began again the next day when he sliced out-of-bounds and was stooping through the barbed-wire fence to find his ball. For the first time in his life he knew that something of immense importance was going to happen to him and that he would soon find out what it was. Ed Cupp was holding the top strand high so he could crawl through, higher than he needed to, to make up for his, Ed Cupp’s, not following him into the woods to help him find the ball. To prove his good intentions, Ed Cupp pulled the wire so hard that it stretched as tight as a guitar string and creaked and popped against the fence posts.
    As he stopped and in the instant of crossing the wire, head lowered, eyes slightly bulging and focused on the wet speckled leaves marinating and funky-smelling in the sunlight, he became aware that he was doing an odd thing with his three-iron. He was holding it in his left hand, fending against the undergrowth with his right and turning his body into the vines and briars which grew in the fence so that they snapped against his body. Then, even as he was climbing through, he had shifted his grip on the iron so that the club head was tucked high under his right arm, shaft resting on forearm, right hand holding the shaft steady—as one might carry a shotgun.
    He did not at first know why he did this. Then he did know why.
    Now he was standing perfectly still in a glade in a pine forest holding the three-iron, a good fifty feet out-of-bounds and not looking for the ball. It was only after standing so for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps two minutes, that he made the discovery. The discovery was that he did not care that he had sliced out-of-bounds.
    A few minutes earlier he had cared. As his drive curved for the woods, the other players watched in silence. There was a mild perfunctory embarrassment, a clucking of tongues, a clearing of throats in a feigned but amiable sympathy.
    Lewis Peckham, the pro, a grave and hopeful man, said: “It could have caught that limb and dropped fair.”
    Jimmy Rogers, a man from Atlanta, who had joined the foursome to make it an unwieldy fivesome, said: “For a six-handicapper and a Wall Street lawyer, Billy is either nervous about his daughter’s wedding or else he’s taking it easy on his future-in-laws.”
    He hit another ball and it too sliced out-of-bounds.
    The other four golfers gazed at the dark woods in respectful silence and expectation as if they were waiting for some rule of propriety to prevail and to return the ball to the fairway.
    As he leaned over to press the tee into the soft rain-soaked turf, he felt the blood rush to his face. Jimmy Rogers had gotten on his nerves. Was it because Jimmy Rogers had messed up the foursome or because Jimmy Rogers had called him Billy? How did Jimmy Rogers know his handicap?
    After teeing up the third ball and as he measured the driver and felt his weight shift from one foot to the other, he was wondering absentmindedly: What if I slice out-of-bounds again, what then? Is a game so designed that there is always a chance that one can so badly transgress its limits and bounds, fall victim to its hazards, that disgrace is always possible, and that it is the public avoidance of disgrace that gives one a pleasant sense of license and justification?
    He sliced again but not out-of-bounds, having allowed for the slice by aiming his stance toward the left rough.
    He said: “I’m picking up. It’s the eighteenth anyhow. I’ll see you in the clubhouse.”
    The slice, which had become worrisome lately, had gotten worse. He had come to see it as an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a minor deceit, perhaps even a sin. One cringes past the ball, hands mushing through ahead of the club in a show of form, rather than snapping the club head through in an act of faith.