Absently he held the barrel of the Luger to his nose, then to his temple, and turned his head to and fro against the cold metal of the gunsight.
Is it too much to wonder what he is doing there, this pleasant prosperous American, sitting in a $35,000 car and sniffing cordite from a Luger?
How, one might well ask, could Will Barrett have come to such a pass? Is it not a matter for astonishment that such a man, having succeeded in life and living in a lovely home with a lovely view, surrounded by good cheerful folk, family and friends, merry golfers, should now find himself on a beautiful Sunday morning sunk in fragrant German leather speculating about such things as the odd look of his wrist (his wrist was perfectly normal), the return of North Carolina Jews to the Holy Land (there was no such return), and looking for himself in mirrors like Count Dracula?
At any rate, within the space of the next three minutes there occurred two extraordinary events which, better than ten thousand words, will reveal both Barrett’s peculiar state of mind and the peculiar times we live in.
First, as he sat in the Mercedes, Luger in hand, gazing at the cat nodding in the sunlight, there came to him with the force of a revelation the breakthrough he had been waiting for, the sudden vivid inkling of what had gone wrong, not just with himself but, as he saw it, with the whole modern age.
Then, as if this were not enough, there occurred two minutes later a wholly unexpected and shocking event which, however, far from jolting him out of his grandiose speculations about the “modern age,” only served to confirm them. In a word, no sooner had he opened the Mercedes door and stepped out than a rifle shot was fired from the dense pine forest nearby, ricocheting with a hideous screech from the concrete floor at his foot to a thunk in the brick of the inner wall. A vicious buzzing bee stung his calf.
Later he remembered thinking even as he dove for cover: Was not the shot expected after all? Is this not in fact the very nature of the times, a kind of penultimate quiet, a minatory ordinariness of midafternoon, a concealed dread and expectation which, only after the shot is fired, we knew had been there all along?
Are we afraid quiet afternoons will be interrupted by gunfire? Or do we hope they will?
Was there ever a truly uneventful time, years of long afternoons when nothing happened and people were glad of it?
But first his “revelation.” As he sat gazing at the cat, he saw all at once what had gone wrong, wrong with people, with him, not with the cat — saw it with the same smiling certitude with which Einstein is said to have hit upon his famous theory in the act of boarding a streetcar in Zurich.
There was the cat. Sitting there in the sun with its needs satisfied, for whom one place was the same as any other place as long as it was sunny — no nonsense about old haunted patches of weeds in Mississippi or a brand-new life in 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 three-wood on a green fairway but rolling away from gunfire and into a safe corner where I can look out without being seen and where I can’t be enfiladed? — all with a secret coolness and even taking a satisfaction in it. This is better than — than what?
Very well, here I am and here it is at last, let them come. What have I to do with this Luger? I don’t know, something. Why do I feel myself most myself here and not hitting a three-wood for an eagle on the back nine? What does my ease with gunfire portend? How is it that I know with certainty that everything is going to be settled in the end with a gun, with this gun, either with them or with me, but with this gun?