The Brunist Day of Wrath

II.1 Thursday 23 April — Saturday 25 April

“It don’t make none a your common sense, Ted, and you know it. This penny ante town can’t afford to fix the potholes or pick up the garbage — how we gonna get into a high stakes headbutt with old man Suggs over a useless goddamned artificial bump in the ground that ain’t even genuine real estate?”

“Land is only useless, Maury, when it’s not being used. It has electric and phone lines already in place, train rails and usable structures. With the flat land the town owns below it, it has industrial park potential, could be developed for housing or for a coal-burning power plant. Might even be turned into a profitable recreational facility.” It angers him to have to wheedle with this irresponsible third-rate shoe salesman who is only the mayor because Ted has made him so. It angers him even more to think about spending so much money on that worthless piece of land, for which he is only inventing improbable uses. But he hates to get beat. If they lose the mine land and hill to Pat Suggs and those religious fanatics, they’ll never be rid of them. He has heard rumors they plan to build on it and that Suggs may be buying up other property nearby. Creating a complex. His voluptuous doodles show signs of anxiety and irritation. Swirly lines flying off in all directions. Ted glances out onto the bank floor, catches her watching him; she looks away. “And the city doesn’t have to pay a nickel up front. You can float a bond and meanwhile the bank will loan the city the entire amount at bank rate.”

“Nah, I’ll never be able to sell this to the council. Let them fundamentalist loonies have their hill, Ted. Who the fuck cares? They’re even bringing in a bit of business. If they turn up in town, we’ll simply shoot ’em.”

“They’re already in town, Maury. Suggs is letting them occupy some of his prefabs in Chestnut Hills.”

“Don’t I know it. The handful of neighbors who still live out there are bellyaching about the filth and noise and overcrowding. It ain’t clear who’s paying the electricity and fuel bills. There are health and fire hazards. I’ve asked the chief to shut that operation down this week. By the way, Dee mentioned this morning there’d been a break-in in some of the mine buildings out there.”

“Really? What got taken?”

“Dee don’t know, says it ain’t his jurisdiction, but figures it was more like vandalism than theft. Someone heard motorcycles, so it’s probably them same shits who was throwing body parts around last Sunday. Unless the mine owners robbed theirselves to collect the fucking insurance.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

“I am disappointed, Mr. Puller. I had supposed this matter would have been taken care of by now.”

“Well, they been laying low, Mr. Suggs. And until now we never really had nothing on them to take them in.”

“Was the slaughter of Mr. Wosznik’s dog nothing? Their outrageous behavior Sunday at the hill? The attack on Cavanaugh’s car? They probably do not even have proper licenses. I know for certain that at least one of them is too young. And some of their motorcycles may have been stolen. Have you checked into that? No, you have waited too long, Mr. Puller, and now we have a serious problem. The theft is undermining my negotiations with the owners for the purchase of the mine. They refer to those bikers as ‘my people.’ This will not do.” “They’re at the top of our agenda now.”

“I should very much hope so, Mr. Puller. We also need your assistance at the church camp. I promised them protection against threatened assaults until they could organize their own security, and I expect you to provide that. Our Patriots organization will be loaning them arms, and perhaps you can make the proper arrangements. You and Mr. McDaniel can provide training. But we have to be cautious. We don’t want to put guns in the hands of unreliable people. And there is no need for powerful weapons, just enough to serve as a deterrent and protect the periphery.”

“I can do that.”

“And we have a possible problem of trespass. The rules of the campsite prohibit use of the main buildings for personal residences, but some of the persons who have come here from elsewhere are presently occupying them. If they do not leave voluntarily, they may have to be removed forcibly.”

“My old faceboss, you mean. Just let me know.”

“I will do so. Now either lock that motorcycle gang up or run them out of here. They are a dangerous threat to law and order. I expect results, Mr. Puller.”

“Dave Osborne?”

“You got him.”

“Dave, this is Ted Cavanaugh over at the bank. How’s it going over there at the old footwear emporium?”

“I’m having a hard time beating away the traffic. Sold a pair of shoelaces just yesterday. Or maybe the day before. You calling for a look at the books?”

“No, this is something else, Dave. There’s been a break-in out at Deepwater. From your time out there as night mine manager, what do you figure might have got taken?”

“Can’t imagine anything worthwhile left behind.”

“What was usually kept there?”

“Tools. Lamps and helmets. Tags. Electrical gear, that sort of thing.”

“Any weapons?”

“I don’t think so. Unless you call old mine picks a weapon. The mine managers on duty got issued a pistol, but I don’t think it’s there anymore.”

Meaning, he took it home with him. “That’s it?”

“Far as I can remember. Maybe some dynamite.”

“Dynamite?”

“Yeah. For shot firing in the old days. It was how coal was loosened from the face. A few years back, we switched to compressed air. A lot safer. We probably got rid of the dynamite, though I remember seeing it on inventories.”

“Dynamite. Holy mackerel.”

“And then Jim got hit by a dead bird and ended up on TV. They’re calling it the Headless Annunciation. God help us if he’s pregnant.” It is Sally’s mother, spreading her daily evangel. “Well, you know Jim, Em. Always in the wrong place at the right time.”

Em does know Jim. Back in high school her mom and dad and the couple who are now the Wetherwaxes used to double date. Only, with each other’s present mates. Who came out best? It’s a draw. Though Archie at least has a real job working for the phone company. They used to park out at the lakes and go for a moonlight swim together. Or anyway they did that once. The family legend. Now the two women talk about their men like pets they keep and clean up after. Sally writes: They were just having fun playing around in offbeat short stories, when suddenly they found themselves in the middle of a hackneyed genre novel. Written by the dim-witted little town whose covers they’re clapped in.

“Jim doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, especially if it’s past eleven in the morning and he’s had a couple. And Ted’s got no sense of humor. Have I said that before?” Will she be able to write her own story? Will it be any better? She thumbs through the notebook to find her drawing of the sleeping prince, sketches in a black phone receiver by his ear, and above it writes: Hello? Hello…? “I suppose you heard about those bikers attacking Ted’s car? He was coming back from a business meeting, and when he told Jim about it, Jim said it sounded like a gang of typical wildhair bankers to him and asked whether Ted noticed if anyone he’d been meeting with had any tattoos, and Ted blew up at him, called him a stupid goddamned you-know-what. Jim still doesn’t know why, but since then he’s started drinking at ten instead of eleven.”

Telephones, she writes. The disembodied self as sown voice. Which is more real, speaker or spoken? The spoken can remain, the speaker cannot. Thus: back to gestures, foreskins.

“Yes, I know, Em, Archie can put it away, too. But at least he has to wait until after he’s stopped climbing telephone poles.” Once, when she had scarlet fever, Sally had to lie all day in the dark, her only entertainment the radio. The voices she heard seemed to hover in the dark like real presences. It’s like that sometimes reading a novel. That weird thing called voice. There but not there, hovering over the text. But nothing is disembodied. That’s a religious idea. Writing, radio, telephony: It’s all just a vaudeville act. Like the first phone conversation. Come here. I want you. A novel in five words. “Yes, I heard that. She’s got Wes penned up in her garage. What do you think’s going on there? Oh yeah? Tell me, I’m all ears…” As an image would that be two big ears or a cluster of them, like that fire god who her anthro prof said was called “the thousand-testicled one”? Sitting bored in class, she tried to draw that, couldn’t. A hundred maybe, max. Small ones.

“It has been a long time since the last inventory, Ted, but the mine owners promised to check it. They are probably nervous about it and may try to cover it up.”

“Nervous?”

“Well, they still own the mine and could be held responsible for leaving such hazardous material unsecured. Especially if it were to be employed in a crime.”

“That could be useful, Nick. The city is backing out of the purchase of the hill, at least at the current asking price, so we may have to try to stop this sale some other way.”

“We have grounds for any number of temporary injunctions. I think we can keep them from taking the hill over for a year at least. Don’t know, though, if we can keep them off it at the same time.”

“And what about the sources of the cult’s money? Where is it all coming from? Have you looked into our own church accounts?”

“I have. Mrs. Edwards seems to have funneled most of the church’s income from the sale back into the camp. Presumably for a Presbyterian halfway house for troubled teenagers, which she’s allegedly building out there. Should be easy to go after her. Getting the money back is another matter. She has also cleaned out her husband’s accounts. Completely illegal. He could sue her.”

“Wes is not part of the real world, Nick. I’m still working on getting him committed. For his own good as much as ours. But there’s talk about their having the wherewithal to build a church on top of that hill. Where the hell did they get it? Can’t be from the camp sale. Suggs again?”

“Well, I’ve hesitated to tell you, but you may be buying it for them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was asking myself the same question: How can they pay for this? So I went scouting around through accounts, looking for large withdrawals and I think I found what I was looking for. It’s bad news, Ted. It’s your wife.”

“What? Irene?”

“Over the past few months she has been moving her funds into a separate account in a bank up in the city. And from there it has almost certainly gone straight into the cult account.”

“But she’s bedridden! How—?”

“Well, she has a telephone. Gave a corporate tax lawyer up in the city power of attorney, and he set it up for her. Know a guy named Thornton? Edgar Thornton?”

“Yeah, I know him. Thorny. Irene’s old college beau before she met me. A Deke.”

“A what?”

“Fraternity guy. Different fraternity. Jesus. I can’t believe this. Can we put a restraining order on the transfer? Non compos mentis, and all that?”

“Probably too late. It’s already gone. Some of it may have been handed over in cash.”

“Or freeze the Brunist accounts?”

“We can try. It’ll be a painful thing, you know.”

“It’s already painful, Nick. Right this minute, I’m having trouble breathing.”

“Eh, ciao, bello. Howza lawr’n-order racket?”

“Had to shoot a stray dog week before last. How’s things up in the big city?”

“Ah, you know, Demetrio, wine, women, and song, the usual stronzata. I miss the old neighborhood.”

“Sure you do.”

“Ascolta, cugino, I’m calling about a hometown boy there, see if I can’t do him a favor since I owe him one. Un buon ragazzo, Charlie Bonali, Vince’s boy — you know him?”

“I know him.”

“He’s a little hard up just now and could use a job. I thought you might have something there for him.”

“Well, there is a police job opening up here, I think, but—”

“Now ain’t that amazing! I thought there might be. And you got problems. You got some lunatic Jesus freaks down there.”

“They’re outside town and so far they mostly been only bothering each other. But—”

“But you never know, right? Those people are completely pazzo!”

“They’re a bit weird.”

“I know, I gotta deal every day here with spics and sambos and dumb hillbillies, all of ’em mostly bombed outa their dim little melons, either with dope or that yelling they call praying. Count yourself lucky! But you’ll like Charlie. He’s big and he’s brave and he takes no shit from nobody.”

“Well, he can come in for a—”

“Except you’n me, right? Shit from you’n me he takes like ice cream.”

“There are other guys running this town. I don’t have the final say who—”

“Right, you got that tinhorn ex-shoe salesman down there, what’s his name, Cass-hole?”

“Yeah, the mayor.”

“I hear he’s been muscling in on our neighborhood, squeezing our people with some kinda fucking protection racket.”

“He’s been campaigning.”

“Well, he won’t be doing that no more, capitano. And you just tell him who you want. I got a feeling he’ll be open to suggestion.”

“I don’t know. The mayor’s got some powerful backers. The bank, for example. And the bank has recently hired a sharp new lawyer who seems to have his eye on just about everything.”

“Nicky Minicozzi, you mean. Yeah, we call him Mini-cazzo. Nicky does what we tell him. Hang loose, cugino. Go to Mass. Pray for our souls.”

“Sure, Dad. If it’s important. I was hoping to stay up here at the fraternity house through graduation. There are a lot of parties going on this weekend. People I may never see again.”

“I know, Tommy. But I do need your help.”

“Is Mom worse?”

“Well, yes and no. But I’ve had to fire the home care nurse and the new one can’t start until next week, so I’m all alone here.”

“What did she do? Steal something?”

“I… I guess you could say so.”

“Dad, you don’t sound good. Are you all right? Dad?”

“I know. It’s all right. Angela told me. She said she’d helped you find the new person.” All week long she has been thinking about leaving. Ever since the night his car was attacked and he got home and found his wife so ill. It was her fault, really, and she has the feeling others think so, too. There is a scandal of some sort brewing and she is afraid of it. But now, just hearing his voice (he is apologizing for missing their traditional Thursday night together; he seems quite shaken and says he needs her more than ever, and she can hear the need and how much older his voice sounds, and it tugs at her), she knows she can’t go. Not yet. Night of a full moon. She’ll eat alone in her room, unable to bear the smirks of the motel staff. “Tomorrow’s out, too, damn it,” he says. “But Tommy’s coming down from university, so Saturday looks good. We can take that drive we talked about.” He looked absolutely stricken while talking on the phone in his office today, and when she brought in some documents for him to initial, she asked if something was wrong. He nodded, then shook his head sadly, as if it were all beyond him. Her heart was racing but he assured her it had nothing to do with her. He has asked her, more than once, about becoming the new Chamber of Commerce executive director, saying that he needed her business and personal relations skills in that job, her youthful enthusiasm, and, well, yes, her beauty, and though they might see a little less of each other, it would spare them the awkwardness of working together at the bank, but she has always made it clear that when her internship at the bank is over she is leaving. And then they both are sad for a while. “Hello? Stacy? Is Saturday okay?” She felt guilty about keeping him late that night, but she just couldn’t let him go. Somehow it seemed like the last night, and at the door, when he was kissing her good night, she knelt and pulled his pants and shorts down and there went another half hour, and he probably didn’t even know as he pressed his fingers into her hair that she was crying a little. She felt so awful the next day when she heard, she even packed her bags. But then just sat staring at them. The only god she has left from her Quaker childhood is love and he’s not always a friendly god, sometimes even kind of scary, more like a demon, really. When little Angela asked her what she believed in, she joked that she was a holyroller for love, but what she didn’t say was that if religious faith was a kind of dangerous madness, so too was love. “Hello? Are you there…? Stacy…?” “Yes. All right. Saturday then.” “I’m doing all I can.” “I know. I love you. And thanks for the flowers. They’re beautiful.”

“Mom? I’ve decided to come home for the weekend to see you. We’re having a special Friday night supper tonight at the fraternity. One of my profs is a guest. I’ll start down right after. How are you doing?”

“Well, I’m dying, my dear. Other than that I’m just fine.”

“I tried to call last night, but the phone was busy or else just disconnected. I suppose you were asleep?”

“Yes, I am at peace in the Lord, Tommy. My soul has been saved and I rest easy.”

“Where’d you learn to talk like that, Mom? It doesn’t sound like you.”

“It is not me, Tommy, not the me you knew. I have been born again. I didn’t know what that meant. Now I do. I am someone new. I surprise even myself.”

“Mom, what’s going on? Dad seems very upset about something.”

“Oh, you know your father, Tommy. If the world doesn’t go according to plan, his plan, he gets all hot under the collar.”

“Why did the home care nurse get fired?”

“Mrs. Filbert is a pious kind-hearted Christian woman. She has helped me through dreadful times in a way that no one else has and I miss her horribly. He has sent some silly little girl over here today in her place who talks to me like I’m three years old. I think your father did it for spite.”

“He said you did something bad.”

“I followed my own lights, as he likes to say and has done for over thirty years, without concern for me or anyone else. I am preparing to meet my Maker, Tommy, and He spoke to me and directed me to free myself of all earthly encumbrances, and I have been doing so.”

“And me, Mom? Am I an earthly encumbrance, too?”

“All that is body is, Tommy. Not your spirit. Which I love more than you can know and hope to have near me through all eternity. The world isn’t going to last much longer, which means at least you may not have to suffer what I am suffering. But you may not have much time. You must always keep Jesus in your heart, Tommy, and…(No, dear. Not now.)”

“Who’s there with you now, Mom?”

“Groovy, Angie! But, hey, wasn’t Tommy here just last week?”

“He says he simply can’t stay away from me! He’s just crazy about me, Ramona!” Angela knows this because of the way he looks at her, especially when gazing down upon her just before That Moment, his eyes ablaze then with adoration and awe (she is so beautiful! she knows this!) and tenderness and passionate desire. Tommy! She’s so madly in love she’s just wet all the time! “He told me so!”

“Oh, Angie, you’re so lucky! Tommy’s a fabulous hunk! And rich! And you mean you’re really calling from his house?”

“Call me back if you like, and see for yourself. And I’ll be here tomorrow, too.” Tomorrow — Ramona knows this, but she is too stupid and shallow and jealous ever to understand the true deep meaning — she and Tommy will make love in this beautiful house (probably even under this very ceiling: she is calling from the phone in his bedroom, poking about, sniffing at things) which may one day be hers. April 25: She has already marked it on her sacred calendar. She’s desperately close to her period, and that’s scary, but hopefully it will not come until Monday. “Poor Tommy! He’s hurting so! He needs me now.” He’s such a bad boy, though. Last weekend on the way to the motel, a used tampon dropped out on her lap. He made up some wild excuse, saying he’d loaned his car to a fraternity brother up at university who must have put it there as a joke, and he became very sweet in his embarrassment, but all Angela could think was: Did he have sex with a girl during her period? That sounds pretty gross, but if things go wrong this weekend, well, if he likes that, she might give it a try. “I still haven’t got over my own mom passing away, so I know what Tommy’s going through.” Even if Mrs. Cavanaugh is really cranky and always complaining — nothing like her own mom who, even when she was dying, kept wanting to help somehow, and never said a word about her pain or fear, just how much she loved her. Thank goodness the old lady is asleep most of the time, lying there in her wrinkly old gown and plastic shower cap, or else looking through her photo albums with her little wire-framed glasses on the end of her skinny white nose. “When Tommy’s father came to ask me yesterday to help out, it was just such a thrill! Especially when he said he specifically wanted a Catholic home care person. It was like he was reaching out to me, you know? I suddenly felt so much closer to him. He’s a wonderful man, so kind, who has suffered so much, and he’s the best employer in the world. I just love him!” On Tommy’s shelves are his trophies and a personalized bowling ball and some framed photos, including a delicious one in his high school basketball uniform, holding a ball at his hip, which must have been taken about the same time they first did it. “Tommy’s mother keeps asking for the other woman who was here. A Baptist-type nurse who did something bad, I don’t know what.”

“I bet she stole something. Those people are like that.” Angela wants to steal that photo. Maybe tomorrow she’ll ask him for it. He’s so cute! She was just a dumb little kid then, but so was he. They are both so much more mature now. At the bottom of his socks drawer, she finds a stack of men’s magazines and, while Ramona rattles on about the stupidity and immorality of Baptist hillbillies and all the craziness out on the mine hill last weekend, she thumbs through them. She recognizes the poses: Tommy asked her to pose the same way for his Polaroid. She loves him, so how could she say no? It made her feel funny, though, like her skin was not her skin but something she was actually wearing. But she could see it made him awfully excited, and it excited her, too, and she took pictures of him (he is so gorgeous!) and he used a timer to take pictures of them together, making love—“I know one should always keep one’s dignity,” her older friend Stacy Ryder once told her, “but really it’s not much use in a love affair…”—and then he let her tear them all up and burn them after, all except one of them together, just kissing (you can’t see the hands), which she let him keep to remember her by when he was away at college. “My dad said there’s some really sick things going on out there, stuff you wouldn’t believe! And those people are everywhere, the fields are full of them like herds of animals! I even saw somebody this morning who looked just like your brother Charlie, only he was ten years older.”

“That probably was Charlie. He’s back. He’s going bald. He made some bad friends up in the city and I think he got into trouble, but you’d never know it. Swaggering around, snapping his fingers, acting the big cheese. He’s already got into a fight with Dad and eaten up all the food in the house.” She is, she knows, as beautiful as any of these women in the magazines, though she sees that her pubic hair is thicker than most of theirs; she will trim it, maybe make a little design. Tommy would like that.

“Angie, now that things are so cool for you and Tommy, can I have Joey Castiglione?”

“Sure, Ramona. He means nothing to me.” She can be generous; she’s not throwing anything away. Joey would never go for fat Ramona Testatonda. Ramona thinks she’s such a big deal just because her dad is a town cop, but Joey Castiglione will still be waiting for his Angela a hundred years from now. She didn’t let Tommy have his way in everything. She knew how to be both firm and gentle when she had to draw the line, like when he wanted to take a picture of her using the bathroom, for example. Absolutely not, Tommy Cavanaugh. Though he did take a picture of himself up close when he was in her other place and she wasn’t looking — how could she be, on her hands and knees? — which was just too gross. No picture like that in these magazines. She asked her older friend at the bank if she ever let people take pictures when they’re intimate like that, and Stacy said no, so maybe she has gone too far, though Stacy smiled and said anything really is all right when you’re in love. And oh yes, she is! Her whole body is shaking and oozing with it.

“Bernice said he just stormed in last night and throwed her and Florrie out, Mr. Suggs. Said they weren’t nothing but common thieves and they’d end up in jail. Bernice is a storyfier, but I credit her account. And his dying wife there in the room, Bernice said, whilst he was throwing his wrath around. She said the poor lady was brave and kept right on smiling, but her lip was a-quivering like a shook rag, and Bernice said she felt like her heart would break. I hope we done the right thing.”

“Of course we have, Clara. The two women have saved another soul and found a way to do God’s will in spite of that evil man. He will try to get the money back now, but I think we have made it safe for the Lord. Are you calling from the new office phone?”

“Yes, and we bless you for that, Mr. Suggs. It is so important to our work. I have used it to call other preachers and let them know we wish to live in peace among them like fellow Christians and I have invited them all to visit us and share in our services.”

“It is good what you are doing, for we must, as they say, keep the dogs at bay. Which reminds me to ask: Has Abner Baxter left the camp premises yet?”

“No, they’re all still here. And some others have been moving in. Using cabins that ain’t even got electricity yet nor roofs nor windows neither, and setting their tents up in the empty spaces and out around the old fire grills. Folks are camped out in the Meeting Hall, too. And there are more tents over on the Mount of Redemption. Ben keeps making them move, but soon as he’s gone, they pop up again. Mostly, though, they been behaving in a helpful and friendly if somewhat stubborn manner. The camp is still a dreadful sight from what them bad boys done to it, and most everbody’s pitching in to fix it up again — even Abner.”

“This won’t do, Clara. If you need workers, I can send you some. Those people were all to have been gone by Tuesday. It is already Friday.”

“Well, they ain’t no place for them to go. They are waiting for the new campsite.”

“They will find a place if you are firm enough. When the new campsite is ready, they will have no choice. I have spoken with Sheriff Puller. But for their own good and the good of the community, they must leave now. You will regret this delay.”

“That may be, but it is a hard thing to do.”

“That’s a laughable offer, Ted.”

“Well, think about it. We have some new problems here. Questions about the sources of the cult’s money, whether or not there might be fraud and embezzlement involved. The mine’s responsibility in leaving dangerous material unguarded—”

“Our inspectors are on the way. We’re sure that stuff was removed years ago. And even if it wasn’t, it has probably deteriorated over time.”

“And if it hasn’t? It’s the sheriff’s belief that the break-in was done by some of Suggs’ people—”

“The sheriff said some renegade bikers.”

“For all I know they are part of Sheriff” Puller’s illegal vigilantes. But there’s also a rumor going around that the owners might have robbed themselves to collect on the insurance. I understand an insurance agent has been around asking.”

“We didn’t do that, Ted.”

“All I’m saying is there’s a rumor. It will have to be investigated.”

“It won’t go anywhere.”

“It will take time.”

John P. Suggs rocks back in his swivel chair in his South County Coal Company office, his thumb hooked in his suspenders, staring out upon the monumental landscape of narrow mounds and deep furrows that he has created. The spokesman for the Deepwater Number Nine owners has just told him that the city has raised its offer. There are some provisos, but they’re tempted to go with it. Pat suspects a bluff. They’re in trouble on the theft. He has had Puller call the company about it, asking difficult questions. He decides to take a chance and lower his offer by a third. The spokesman says that makes no sense in the face of the city’s improved bid, and adds that there are rumors of fraud and embezzlement behind the Brunists’ funds. “This is my money,” John P. Suggs says, “and you know my money is good. What I’m offering you is still a lot more than the mine is worth. You’d better grab it while you can.” There is a long pregnant pause. John P. Suggs smiles out upon his domain. He was right.

“Well, let us talk with your lawyers.”

“I don’t have any lawyers. You talk to me.”

“Hi, Sally? This is Billy Don, you know, out here at the camp and all that? We just got a new phone line into the office and I’m, like, testing it out.”

“Well, hey, Billy Don, it works.”

“Yes, well, hah, I thought I’d give you a call, see if we could maybe sort of get together for a minute. There’s something I need to…”

“Sure. Beautiful day. You want me to come out—?”

“No! No, I have to make a Randolph Junction mail run and pick up some, you know, typing ribbons in Tucker City. Can you meet at the drugstore there in about, like, an hour?”

On this beautiful day, the beautiful man, sitting all alone in his dingy bank office and feeling old and ugly, hangs up the phone, crumples his squiggly doodles and baskets them. Stacy has checked out of the motel. No forwarding address. Somehow, inexplicably, he has lost her, even as he has lost his wife, who has turned against him, betrayed him, and his town, which is abandoning him. As though the switchboard were fused, connections severed. A couple of nights ago, in the still of the night, he heard the bikers, or thought he did, and their distant grumble seemed to presage a nightmare, and that nightmare has come to pass. He decides to call home and check on the young Bonali girl, who is staying with Irene for the day, but the phone is busy. He imagines that Irene must be talking to that damned butt-in Edgar Thornton, so he calls him up in the city to see if his line is busy too. It is not. The secretary hooks him up immediately.

“Ah… Thorny, you’re there. How are you? Ted Cavanaugh here, voice out of the past.”

“Hello, Teddy. I thought you might be calling.”

“Thorny, Irene is dying.”

“She told me she was not well. She is a lovely lady. I am very sorry to hear it.”

“I mean, she’s not herself, goddamn it. You’ve helped her to do a very bad thing, Thorny.”

“You mean give her money to a church? In my book, Teddy, that’s a beautiful and virtuous act.”

“Yeah, well, all right, to her own church maybe. But these people are not her people.”

“Evidently they are now. I believe she has found a peace with them she did not find with her people, as you call them. No doubt meaning your—”

“Thorny, you have gone behind my back and taken advantage of a sick woman who is on a lot of drugs and mostly out of it, damn it. That was our money, not hers alone. I will hit you for your fees and all that you siphoned away, and goddamn it, I’ll strip you of your license as well.”

“I have spoken at length with Irene. She is a relatively young woman and plainly in command of her faculties. The accounts, perhaps for evasive tax reasons, were solely in her name so the transfers were legal. And I did not charge a fee. I did it as an old friend.”

“Oh hell. But, hey, Thorny, aren’t I an old friend, too?”

“Teddy, you were never a friend. Take care. I suggest you open your heart to Jesus and prepare for His imminent return and the final judgment which will follow.”

“Omigod…”

“Well, that’s a start, I guess.”

“I am mighty beholden to you, Bernice, for gittin’ summa that penny-silly for my boy to cure his nasty infliction. If Jewell’d found out, he’da got a awful whuppin’.”

“Well, boys’ll be boys, Florrie, and they’s scads a wicked ladies ready to prey upon them. And upon older men, too, who should oughta know better, like that disgraceful reprobate we useta work for. You just know there’s a woman somewheres.

“You mean, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“Nobody else. Every week, come Thursday night, he’s off and away, you seen that, and some other nights, too, when he gets a surge. He says he’s on business, but there’s only one sorta business gets done that time of day. You can smell it on him when he gets back worse than Ahasuerus’s harem. His tie hanging like something used up and strange hairs all over him. And that poor knotty thing a-dying away in there in plain sight, her angel wings already half sprouted — you can see them poking out her shoulder blades.”

“Who y’reckon—?”

“Not who, Florrie, but how many? Men like that, there’s never only one. If he does get contentious, I figure we got something to bemean him with, though I misdoubt he’s the sort who’d give a care.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t wanta cause no trouble, Bernice.”

“Well, Florrie, sometimes like Judith, we just got to take history in our own hands.”

“Oh no! You don’t reckon on cuttin’ off his head!”

“Oh, Florrie, course not! Why do you always take things so literal? Judith was maybe a smidge harsh, but the point is when she and her people were being persecuted by this rich powerful enemy, she just didn’t set back and let it happen. She knew how to be a hero and save her people, and we have to try and do the same!”

“We want to thank you for joining us at the Mount of Redemption last Sunday, Mr. Castle, even if your purposes was not entirely friendly. But, as I’m sure you witnessed, we are peaceful folk; it’s them others who’s acting badly. We don’t ask for your pertection, but we do ask for your understanding.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll do what we can, Mrs. Collins. Thank you for your call. (Hey, sweetheart, next time ask who’s calling before you hand me the fucking phone, awright?)” Click.

“Hey, Nick. Wanted to catch you before you left for the afternoon.”

“Beautiful day out there, Ted. You should be out on the course.”

“I’d probably just ram my wedge up the butt of the first guy who told me it was a beautiful day. Right now, I have to head home to relieve the kid from the bank who’s saint-sitting. I got nowhere with Thornton, Nick. What have you learned?”

“Well, the Brunist bank accounts are pretty fat but don’t show large recent deposits. They’ve probably opened up another account somewhere for your wife’s money. They’ve got phones out at the camp now. We can keep closer tabs.”

“What? You mean tap them?”

“I think I can arrange it. I understand they have also instituted armed guards. And the rumor is that Suggs has closed a deal on the mine.”

“Damn. Can we do anything about slowing that down?”

“Already in the works. One weakness Suggs has: he doesn’t trust lawyers. We can run circles around him.”

“And that motorcycle gang?”

“They’ve either left the area or are lying low. Not much we can do until they’re caught, and that’s something the county or the state will have to do.”

“I’ve talked with the governor. Not very helpful. Says the sheriff seems to be doing his job. Maybe the possibility of stolen dynamite will wake him up.” Not much hope of that. The mine owners will have got to the gutless bullshitter with their own soporific story. Elections are won, he once said, not by what you do, but by what you don’t do. “Speaking of sleepwalkers, I ran into Jim Elliott on the street. Maybe he said something about a beautiful day, too. I’m afraid I really leaned into him. I may even have fired him.”

“I know you’ve got a problem there.”

“I was hoping to find some young blood for that Chamber of Commerce job, try to get this town moving again, but so far no candidates.”

“The young woman here at the bank?”

“Doesn’t want it.” He stands, relieving the constriction in his chest. “You once mentioned the notion of a city manager instead of what we have now. I’ve been thinking about that. Of course, we couldn’t dump the mayor without a lot of citywide restructuring. But I think the city council is fed up with him. There’s even talk of an investigation. We might start with a job that relieved him of a lot of his day-to-day operational duties — taking care of the finances, for example — and adding in the duties of the Chamber executive director under some new title. A kind of take-over, make-over role. Would you be interested in that, Nick?”

“You mean as a job? I don’t know…”

“Well, think about it. And what you’d need to make it worth your while. Meanwhile, I’d like to try to revive the old Common Sense Committee somehow. This was something we used back when the Brunist cult started up here. Involved the whole community. We need something like it again. Needs a new name, though. West Condoners for a Better Future, or something.”

“Out of the Past and Into the Future.”

“Something like that.”

“A New Order for West Condon.”

“Better.”

“The acronym would be NOWC. Like Now West Condon.”

“Hey, I like it. Maybe a New Outlook.”

“Or New Opportunities.”

“I think you have it, Nick. Let’s call it that. New Opportunities for West Condon. NOW West Condon. Brilliant. I was going to be out of town tomorrow, but it looks like I’ll be staying around. I’ll get started on it.”

“Don’t call it that, Tommy. It sounds more like merchandise or something.”

“What should I call it?”

“It doesn’t have to have a name, Tommy. Just think about it.”

“I do all the time. It drives me crazy. What do you call mine?”

“I’ve never called it anything.”

“Do you like it?”

“Of course I do. I love it. I love everything about you, Tommy.”

“Sure, but what about my ass? Go ahead, I can take it. Tell me what you really think.”

“Your mom might be listening in, Tommy!”

“Oh yeah. How’s she doing?”

“Well, it’s very difficult for her, but your mom’s the sweetest person. I just love her. It’s so sad she’s so ill.”

“She’s sounding pretty weird to me.”

“Your dad says that’s because of the people who were taking care of her before. That’s why he asked me for a Catholic person and I found Concetta for him.”

“I wish she could make it this weekend. I’m going to be missing a lot of good parties up here.”

“Well, but you have me.”

“Right. I know. You and your beautiful ass! I can hardly wait!”

“Please, Tommy…”

“In fact I’m looking at it right now. Gorgeous!”

“In your imagination, you mean?”

“No, in a photo. You know those Polaroids we took in the motel on that crazy end-of-the-world night?”

“Yes, but we tore all those up and burned them.”

“All except one.”

“The one of us kissing.”

“Yeah, well, I switched. I kept the one where I asked you to say cheese upside down.”

“Oh no! Not the one on my hands and knees!”

“Right! End of the world!”

“Tommy Cavanaugh, you bring that photo with you when you come and we’ll tear it up while I watch!”

“I don’t know if I can. My fraternity brothers asked for it for their meeting room, something to, you know, bow down to, and since I’m the chapter chaplain, how could I refuse?”

“Oh Tommy. You’re such a tease. Do you love me?”

“Yeah, sure. You know that.”

“Come home, Tommy. Skip the party. Come quickly.”

Somewhere a phone is ringing, beckoning her from afar. A voice like that of Jesus. She wishes to answer the call — for eternity may depend upon it — but she cannot. She has been rendered immobile, her body existing in a different dimension, she rising from it, but inertly afloat, unseen. There is a problem. What’s the matter? Something to do with her ability to transmit and receive. The lines are crossed, and there is nothing she can do. The Bible in her hands is like a phone book, its verses alphabetized and scattered among the white and yellow pages, hiding the destination she seeks. You know the father, someone says. She does, but even so she cannot find his name. How could she? Her eyes are closed. If, disembodied, she has eyes. She wants only to rise into the light. There must be an opening. If only she could reach the switchboard. But the switchboard has melted. Did she say goodbye? It doesn’t matter.

“Resign? What do you mean ‘resign’? Damn it, you can’t do that, Maury.” Ted doesn’t like to be called at home. The ring can awaken Irene, doped up as she is, and set off a bad night. “I’m going to try to get you some help, but we can’t have any instability while we have all these problems. What’s the matter?”

“Well, for starters, some asshole up in the city with a scary accent is trying to stop me from campaigning in Dagotown.”

“You get his name?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t even wanta know it.” When Castle speaks, the phone can be set down in one room and heard in the next. “And wait till you see our likely next cop. Know Charlie Bonali?”

“I know his father. Should be all right.” He’s had too much to drink and dozed off in front of the television, this jarring intrusion further souring his sour mood. It’s a good thing the telephone separates them, else he might do serious damage to the stupid ass. Lem Filbert has been blunt about him. A crook. It’s something he should get on top of. Soon. Outside, a fat moon is rising. Another sort of call. “His sister works for me in the bank.”

“Yeah? How’d she get that job, Ted?”

“If you mean, did she have big-city sponsors, the answer is no. There was an opening, she was the most qualified applicant.”

“Yeah, well, I got a feeling that’s gonna be her badass brother’s case, too.”

“Hey, Tommy. Saw your mom’s wagon in the drive this morning and knew you were back. Is everything okay?”

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I don’t want you ever in my car again. You are totally weird.”

“I know it.” Sally grins, thinking about the surprise that butter-bags must have got when Riding the Hood’s ruby bullet landed in her lap, and writes: Another first in the history of armed warfare. “Those religious people out on the hill apparently think I’m some kind of diabolical fiend in league with Satan.”

“They’re damn right.”

“If they weren’t all so stuck in their beefcake fantasies, they’d say I was the Antichrist, but that’s too big a deal for a woman. You remember that wall-eyed kid out there with the pilot shades and cute hangdog look?”

“Sure. What awful thing did you do to him?”

“I bought him an ice cream sundae. He snuck away from the camp and met me over in Tucker City. At first he just wanted to warn me that I’d been demonized by the cult and that I should stay away from the camp for my own health, while at the same time trying to talk me into pulling on one of those nighties and becoming a member.”

“What did you do to get so famous?”

“After you left Sunday, I got those two boys to invite me up the hill. Research for Professor Cavanaugh, you know. I got lots of notes for you, but I never quite fit in, I don’t know why.” She pauses to let him make a wisecrack about that, thumbing through her notebook and coming on that cartoon of Sleeping Beauty with the beard and boner and inked-in phone receiver. When he passes (he’s probably scratching himself and yawning, pissed off by the call), she says, “And then a really creepy thing happened. While I was still talking to an old lady there at the tent, she winked at me and died. I freaked out and took off down the hill, and now they all think I sucked the life out of her.” She liked that old lady. She’d felt blessed by her.

“And after that they still want you to join up? I thought it was that kind of outfit. Bunch of whacked-out vampires. You should fit right in.”

“Poor Billy Don is pretty mixed up.” Well, that hangdog look: he fancies her, give the boy his due.

“Billy Don?”

“That’s the boy’s name. When I said no thanks, he switched and made it clear he wanted out himself. It was getting too intense, he said, too unreal. His buddy Darren, that’s the other one, apparently obsesses over the end of the world day and night, and it’s beginning to drive Billy Don nuts.” She understands that — it’s hard to live around crazy people, especially when they don’t know they’re crazy — yet she almost envies this fascination with cosmic mysteries and wishes it didn’t all seem so ordinary to her. She stubs out her cigarette. Maybe she should take up astronomy. She adds sunglasses to the bearded sleeper, and while Tommy makes what might be nose-blowing noises on the other end, writes: Beauty comes on a sleeping Prince Charming, lance in hand, and wonders whether or not she should wake him up. How will he behave when he has to give up his wet dreams? It might leave him with nothing to hold on to, so to speak. “He said he really wanted to get on that bus to Florida — you know, the one all those kids with guitars came on — but things are a mess at the camp after the bikers trashed it, and he couldn’t let his pal and Mrs. Collins down just when they needed him.” Beauty’s own life in the world has been something of a mixed bag, as they say out in the briars. Why drag poor Charming into it? Like her father, he’d just be completely baffled and get drunk all the time. “Also, I think Darren made a play for him and he wasn’t ready for that.”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy perks up at that. “What’d he say?”

“One night he woke up and Darren was touching him.”

“Yeah, well, did he like it?”

“I don’t think he did. I think it scared him a little.”

“But what did he do?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He liked it.”

The telephone table is full of tiny black burn marks where her father — in one stupor or another, or maybe in a pique because of phoned abuse — missed the ashtray. He’s in deep trouble, she knows, with Tommy’s dad. He’s going to lose his job, and then what will they do? It’s not fair. He can’t help it if he’s about as clever as a broken pump handle and can only mimic the world in his friendly stupidity. He’s the sort of guy who uses a whiskey-flavored toothpaste, a Christmas gift from his friend Archie Wetherwax, and has a cigarette lighter that plays “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which is his idea of high culture. Her mom is smarter — she’s been known to read a bestseller or two and professes to adore Chopin’s “Moonlight Sonata”—but she has been completely warped by this dumb town. “So how’s your mom doing, Tommy?”

“About the same. If anything, when she’s lucid, she seems better. More feisty. I’m home because dad had to fire the home care nurse and needs a break. Bad fucking story.”

“What happened?”

“Can’t say exactly. But it seems the woman stripped her out. All Mom’s savings. The woman is one of those crazy cultists, it turns out, and I think they got it all. Dad’s shattered by it. But it’s also fired him up. He’s getting up some kind of community action committee again, and he says he’s going to throw the book at those freaks. That’s what he’s working on now down at the bank. Mom is teed off about all of this, of course, and not easy to get on with.”

Growing up, Sally saw a lot of Tommy’s mother. Their mothers often took them to the park or pool together. Back when the brain was just warm mud and didn’t hold on to much, so it’s all pretty dim. But she always remembered his mother as a sweet, passive creature, very quiet and unassuming. Pretty, even when she got older. Sally’s mom always did all the talking. “It’s sad, Tommy. Getting old is sad. How about if I drop by for a Saturday morning toke? I can say hello to your mom and give you my notes from last Sunday.”

“Not today, Sal. I’m about to take a shower, get the day going. And then I’ve got company this afternoon.”

For some reason, doodling, thinking about Christ’s multitude of foreskins maybe, she has given the sleeping prince a second dick. Give Beauty a kind of kisser’s on-off switch. And if she gets mad, she can bite one off and still have one to play with. Tommy’s, if memory serves, is circumcised. This memory comes not from the ice plant — she went blind that night — but from hairless childhood. To play it safe, she draws one with a foreskin, the other without. That way he’ll be good to go, no matter which way it swings in the afterlife. “Well, let me know, professor,” she says, trying not to sound hurt or angry, but no doubt sounding hurt and angry. “I’m only a phone call away.”

“That’s right. New Opportunities. You know, for West Condon. What do you think?” Ted’s tenth or twelfth call of the morning. He can’t even remember who he’s talking to now. Probably someone on the city council. The voice on the other end sounds like it’s coming out of a windy cave. Archie Wetherwax up a phone pole, maybe. Who will beg off so that he can stay home and play with his model train set. Nothing happening out on the bank floor this Saturday morning. Nothing at all. “We hope to acquire some new properties, see if we can lure some corporate and industrial investment to the area.” He’s still making swirly shapes with his penciled doodles like some kind of weird flowers, but now, whenever lines cross to create closed spaces, he finds himself blacking them in. Well, he’s an old guy with a lot of history, and she’s just a kid. He’s known all along there’d be no long-term gain. It was more like a casino night: fast, fun, full of calculated risk, empty-handed at the end. But he hadn’t realized her leaving, though it had to happen, would hit him so hard. “Yes, those fanatics are part of our concern, too.” It’s the priest he’s talking to now. Key ally. So wake up. “They’re responsible for a lot of our troubles here, Father Baglione, and we want them to move on before things get out of hand again.” He’s had his fair share of casino nights, but mostly out of town, while attending board meetings or sales conferences, pursuing investments, and the returns have been minimal but no debts or regrets, no troublesome residue. As a reliable donor to Republican party campaigns and a local organizer and counselor, he also gets invited from time to time to Governor Kirkpatrick’s hunting parties (have to call him), and there are always lots of women around there, too. Short-term investments with little or no payback, just a pleasurable way to get rid of excess capital. That of the pocket, that of the loins. One of his upstate partners has shown him how to make most of it tax deductible. He even includes condoms among his promotional supply expenses, buys them by the carton. “You saw last Sunday the problems we face, Connie.” The Lutheran minister has agreed to replace Wes Edwards at the Rotary Club and Ted wants him to focus his introductory remarks on the new action committee and its challenges. “We have to come together as a united citizenry, and we might as well start praying for it at the Wednesday luncheon.” In all his previous affairs, it has always been easy come and easy come again. So what’s different this time? Well, he has fucking fallen in love, that’s what. “Goddamn it, Jim, that’s stupid! I ask you what you think of our New Opportunities for West Condon idea and you can only make a lame joke about nude opportunities?” He hangs up on the drunken sonuvabitch with a bang, which causes the little Bonali girl out on the bank floor to start and glance his way. He shrugs and winks solemnly, turns away, recalling Stacy’s mimicry. He’d brought up the idea of her taking over Jim Elliott’s job, but she only laughed and then did an exact imitation of Elliott’s stupid look, his dumb remarks. To prove, she said, she’d be perfect for the job. He’s crazy about her. Never thought it could happen again, never wanted it to happen, and it did. She has brought something magical into his life. It’s as though he’s been spared from following poor Irene into the grave. An illusion, of course. Like religion, as Stacy would say. Though she believes in love like others believe in Jesus. He called his old fraternity brother up at the business school to ask if he’d seen her or heard from her. No, but he had another sharp student he might like. He was sorry he’d called. “Nick works for the bank, Burt. Guy I met at a business meeting up in the city. I don’t think he even goes to church.” It’s nickel-and-dime Burt Robbins he’s talking to. He’s telling him about his city manager idea and Burt has asked him if he thinks it’s smart to hand over that much power to the Italians. He says the mayor won’t like it. “The mayor told me he wanted to quit.” That surprises Burt, but Ted doesn’t say more, changes the subject, says he has been on the phone to a couple of old profs and may have found a good candidate to replace Edwards at the church. “Young fellow named Jenkins. Something of a scholarly type, like Connie Dreyer, but said to be good at reaching out to the community and building consensus.” Got the impression talking with him that he was something of a naïve ditherer and probably not even a golfer, but they’ve got to get a body in the pulpit soon, reopen the church before the doors rust shut. Ted has chewed his pencil through to the lead. He snaps it in two. Relax. She’ll be back, she needs him, she can’t stay away. He’s arrogant enough to believe that. Meanwhile, the break is a good thing. Instead of an idle drive in the country, he’s getting a lot of work done. He calls Lem Filbert to apologize for having to let his sister-in-law go, but it was a very serious matter. “She took advantage of my wife’s incapacities.” Lem says he hopes the crazy bitch ends up in the fucking clink and stays there, he’s fed up with her religious wackiness and she needs to have her ass kicked. Lem’s a good man and Ted tells him so while thinking about Stacy’s sweet little behind, so arousing when she turns it toward him. Lit softly by the fading light coming through the motel window. To be kissed, not kicked. He asks when his car will be ready and Lem says he plans to finish the painting this afternoon. Should be dry by Monday, looking like new. “No hurry, Lem. No use for it until then.” But, no, it’s not a good thing. He’s in pain. He imagines the drive. The sun. Her smile. Her hand in his lap. It’s a long long way from May to December… He’s not a hummer, but now he’s humming. There you go. Though that one’s about growing old. The days dwindle down to a precious few… He takes a deep breath and presses on with his NOWC calls (ah, damn the world and the way time fucks us!), trying to get his mind off her, and while he’s got Judge Altoviti on the phone, he inquires about Concetta Moroni, the woman he has just hired, sight unseen, as a home care worker. Altoviti says she’s a strong, reliable, big-hearted woman who was widowed by the Deepwater blast and could use the work; so, good, he’ll stick with her. Not all news is bad. Irene has become an evangelical; now she can become a Catholic. Just to be sure, he calls Nick Minicozzi upstairs and asks him to do a background check. “And while you’re at it, you might try to get me a rundown on the bank’s investments in Deepwater or in any of its managers, outstanding loans, that kind of thing. I think we put some money into a gasification project of theirs. Bad field position, but until that deal is signed and sealed, we still might have a play or two left in our locker.” September… November… When Nick asks, he says, “I may come out for a late nine.” Vince Bonali’s daughter, who gave him the Moroni connection, is doing some quiet housekeeping behind the counter, filling the time until they close at one. Then she’s off to the house to help out with Irene. Ted’s well aware he has set Tommy up with an in-house lay today, though he apparently needs no help. Consolation for dragging him back from university. The girl is cute, though far beneath Tommy. Should he call her father about NOWC? No. Lesson learned. He has just taken a grip on the phone to call Dave Os-borne at the shoe store, thinking about Stacy showing him the shoes she’d bought there (even her feet he loves, and the way she stands and walks on them, the way she turns the soles up when—), when it rings. Almost as if by grasping it he has triggered it. If you hold the blackened doodles to the light just right, they shine like silver. He hangs up with a whispered I-love-you and calls the garage. “Listen, Lem, if its drivable, I might take the Lincoln out for the weekend after all and bring it back Monday. Yeah? Great.” He signals to the staff to lock up. To fall so hard. And feel so good.

II.2 Saturday 25 April

On a slight rise on the way into what he knew when a boy as the Presbyterian No-Name Wilderness camp, within view of the artificial bump of land their little movement grandly called the “Mount of Redemption,” Pach’ Palmers stops to take a leak beside the panel truck that is his present home. It’s his first time to see that goddamned mine hill since the day he got arrested on it. When he came back to West Condon after his release a couple of years ago, looking in vain for Elaine, he was able to pick up the old Chronicle delivery van, and once he got it running, he headed out here. But he turned back at the edge of town. He was starting up a new life. It seemed like bad karma, as Sissy would say. What a crazy time, what a crazy day. Life does throw up some fucking doozies. That one cost him a stretch in the slammer. Pach’ lifts his cock and aims his stream toward the Mount, wishing he could piss away that awful day, the worst day of his life.

What was he really thinking that day? Did he think the end of the world was coming? That Jesus was going to come flying down out of the storm, superhero cape flapping, and whisk them all off to Paradise? He was so hot for Elaine’s body, he didn’t know what he was thinking. He was holding on to her hand, hoping to find some place they could at least kiss, last chance and all that, but they were on a barren hillside with one sick rickety tree, surrounded by freaked-out Jesus worshippers, the whole world watching, and nowhere to go. And, anyway, there was no budging her. Elaine was completely lost to the insane moment and stood there in the rain, her tunic pasted to her skinny body, rain and tears streaming down her face, looking out on the crowds or else up into the sky. Down at the foot of the hill, those they called the powers of darkness were massing up, including all the reporters and photographers and state cops, and overhead: the mind-rattling yak yak yak of police helicopters. All their own people, showing off all they had in their wet flimsy tunics, were praying, singing, crying, and flinging themselves about in holy fits, their tunics turning black and brown in the mud. It was pretty arousing. He had a massive hard-on impossible to hide under his soaked tunic, which not even fear of the impending apocalypse could shrink. He was able to bend his underwear elastic band down over the head, and belt it in somewhat with the rope they all wore at the waist, but it kept slipping, and when it did it stuck out a mile. He thought: Well, Jesus, here I am, take me, sins and all. Then the town newspaper editor showed up. Mr. Miller. The guy who’d pretended to be a friend and fellow believer, but who’d turned on them like Judas. Exposed them. Made them look like dumbass jerks. Everybody said he was why Bruno’s sister went crazy, why she’d died in the end. So he was a killer, too. They were all charging down on him. The Antichrist. Or the Antichrist of the moment, anyway. He let go of Elaine’s hand and joined them. It was something he had to do. He remembered pummeling the guy there in the pouring rain, hitting him over and over, wishing he could kill him, the girl’s corpse somehow bouncing around in the middle of it all, pointing her blue arm at everybody. The guy’s clothes got torn off, and in the end Pach’ was pounding a lifeless naked body dressed in mud and blood. People were jumping on it. Somebody had an ax. Pach’ thought they had killed him. Only some time later did he learn the poor sonuvabitch had somehow survived. Elaine’s mother had had something to do with it. He was grateful for that. He was sorry about what he’d done. Doubly sorry, because when he went looking for Elaine again, he found Junior Baxter whipping her with a switch, and he laid into the spongy tub of shit — second time that spring, throwing him into the mud and punching him with both fists — only to have Elaine start clawing him and scratching him and throwing her nearly naked body down on Junior to shield him and screaming at Carl Dean to go away, go away. And with that, he lost it. He turned and pitched himself like a howling maniac at the advancing state troopers, taking down a couple of them before they all piled onto him. He was sent up to detention for six months for that, though he doesn’t remember anything after seeing Elaine’s little body on top of fat Junior with blood all over his stupid face.

Anniversary last Sunday. The nineteenth of April. He might have made it here in time had it not been for a leaky radiator. Just as well not. They were probably all over on that hill again and he would only have repeated the whole mess or made it worse. Five years. Long time ago. Seems like a different lifetime. Fuck, it was a different lifetime. Pach’—he wasn’t called Pach’ then — was an ignorant young dickhead with a susceptibility for big total answers. He was president of the Baptist Youth Group and full of furious opinions (how easy it was to speak of God and Jesus then; they were like pals on the track team, and he was elbow to elbow with them, slapping butts) when his high school reading and writing teacher Mrs. Norton drew him and his friend Colin into her goofball Seventh Aspect fantasies, and then, after the coalmine disaster, they followed her when she got mixed up with the lone survivor, Giovanni Bruno, a weird lunatic like all so-called prophets, one thing following another with a kind of mad irresistible logic. Religion’s appeal, no matter how nutty, to the down-and-out. He knows all about that, having been there all his life. The need for divine intervention to serve up just desserts, give the loveless something to love, cure the incurable, take revenge upon the wicked. Focused, God-sanctioned hatred. Oh yes, he felt all that, sometimes still does. He has an explosive nature; he knows that. He has learned to keep things in check, but as a kid he was just so damned angry all the time. He might have killed somebody and often wanted to. It was what made him let go of Elaine’s hand. He let go of everything when he let go of that hand. Everything. He hated Miller at the time. Now he thinks of him as pretty much the smartest guy he ever knew. Sure dumb of him to turn up out there, though, after all he’d done. Must have been Bruno’s sister who dragged him out. It was her body he was trying to reach when he got set upon. Pach’ can understand that. Same with Elaine now. Why he’s here. Except at least Elaine’s still kicking.

Trying to track Elaine Collins down is mostly what he’s done ever since they uncaged him. The six-month rap became a year for mouthing off and throwing his food on the floor and getting into fights with the other punks in detention, and they gave him another five in the state pen after he blew up and punched a sado guard. Laid the sick asshole out cold, sorry only that he hadn’t broken his neck. They might not have let him go anyway. His fucked-up parents had split and left the cheap development at the edge of town and he had no idea where they were, nor wanted to know, so as a juvenile there was no one he could be sent home to. No other relatives wanted him. He was too ugly. After a row or two in the pen, he settled down into his old camp counselor ways and they finally let him go after a couple of years. He was supposed to keep in touch with a parole officer, but he never did. He boarded a bus and came back here. He couldn’t have afforded the train, were it still running, but it wasn’t. The closing of the coalmines had also meant the closing of the railroads. West Condon itself was like it had always been only more run down, needing a fresh coat of paint. He wasn’t shopping, he was looking for Elaine, but she and her mother had left town along with most everyone else he knew, and, except for vague rumors of Brunist doings around the country, there was not much local news about them, so what he got out of the trip instead was his panel truck. He had wanted to apologize to Miller — tell him he was fucking right, they were all dumbass jerks, right on, man — but the Chronicle was closed. Miller had flown the coop, nothing left on the newspaper premises but a print shop run by an old schoolteacher and track coach he once had. Miller, the coach said, was reporting for network TV, something Pach’ never saw except sometimes in bars. Where no one was looking at the news. The paper’s rural delivery van sat out in the parking lot, its tires flat, battery dead, lights busted out, muffler falling off, hoses and fan belt shot, no shocks at all, but the body was not too rust-eaten and the engine looked repairable. The coach let him have it for a token dollar. A tall, sour ex-coalminer named Lem Filbert had a garage at the edge of town and he hired himself out to him in exchange for a tow, some used parts, a set of retreads, a meal a day, and Lem’s mechanical know-how, serving as night watchman on the side for he was already sleeping in the thing, Lem’s widowed sister-in-law providing him some old bedding. A part-time nurse of some kind who had plucked eyebrows and was so religious she dressed like women in Bible pictures. She joined their group around Bruno at the end, but he didn’t remember seeing her out on the hill that day. Maybe she didn’t want to get her clothes wet. She was the one who told him Elaine’s mother was now married to the singer Ben Wosznik and was doing missionary work somewhere over near the Carolinas, and yes, far as she knew, her daughter was still with them. When he had the van rolling again, he headed east. Lem worked hard and demanded hard work, but he was good to him in the end, filling his tank and stuffing a few bucks Pach’ knew he could not afford into his pocket.

The Brunists, he discovered when chasing around after them, had gone big time while he’d been locked up. They had churches all through that part of the country, radio and television programs, billboards and piles of pamphlet handouts, songs on the hillbilly stations, tent meetings said to draw thousands. Hundreds certainly. He saw them, looking for Elaine. The end of the world? Still on. Sometime. Soon. Patience, jackass, patience — that old church camp skit. Back in West Condon, nobody had seemed to know much about any of this. So much happens in this country that no one ever hears about. On their home turf, except maybe for Lem’s sister-in-law, the Brunists were a joke. They’d all made fools of themselves, dancing around half-naked in the rain, waiting for a Rapture, as they called it, that never happened. It was embarrassing. They should have disappeared into jokes the next day, but instead they’re a big religion. Hard to figure. Of course, Jesus Christ: same story. People are weird. Key apparently has been Elaine’s mother. Old lady Collins is a powerhouse and an organizational genius and a saint. Everybody says so. He remembers her as a big, horsey lady with raw red hands, nearly six feet tall, dressed in print dresses and wide white pumps. She had a way of belting out battle cries like some kind of general or football coach and was at the same time given to throwing herself around and bawling like a stuck pig and talking to her dead husband like he was in the same room with her. Pach’ was always afraid of her and knew she didn’t like him very much.

The search for Elaine was mostly fruitless, but he didn’t work all that hard at it either, even obsessed as he was. Something in him kept holding him back. Afraid of what he might say or do, maybe. Especially if she didn’t want to see him, and why should she? So he took odd jobs slinging hash, working on the roads, making deliveries, and wandered about, following their trail, but fell into a funk and backed off whenever it looked like he might be getting close. Went to country bars instead. Got sloshed. Man of constant sorrow. He hadn’t forgotten Elaine’s Day of Redemption betrayal. How could he after what it cost him? But his sweeter memories of her and his hopes of winning her back were what had gotten him through these bad years, so he has kept chasing her even while shying away, fantasizing some kind of future with her and whacking off to the memory of her little body, just as he’d done all through his prison days, just as he is doing now, standing at the edge of a gravel road under the warm April sun, his fist pumping.

He especially liked to think back on that night on the way home from the mine hill with a carload of chicken feathers when he kissed her and grabbed her leg and more besides — and she wasn’t mad after. It was Easter Sunday, a week before the day when the world was supposed to end, though it felt more like the world was just beginning. Wasn’t that the point of Easter? He has had a good feeling about that day ever since, in spite of the stupid Jesus story that goes with it. Colin Meredith was along that night, and they parked on a side street, and by agreement, Colin got out to take a walk. They were coming from a service on the Mount and dressed only in their Brunist tunics and white underwear, and the feel of her flesh through the thin tunic is what he remembers, first her shoulder and armpit (the knotty edge of her little bra), then her leg, then her whole body as he pulled her hard against him, grabbing her tight little bottom through the tunic and cotton panties, her tummy against his, everything twisting and leaping and shivering, the gearshift somewhere in the middle of it all like an extra dick. He scared her, and he was scared too as she began to bawl and get hysterical, and he backed off, apologizing, starting to cry himself and cursing himself for his rough ways. He kissed her cheek softly, whispering his sorries to her, and blinked the lights for Colin to come back, and then, later, as they were walking from the car toward Giovanni Bruno’s house, he told her he loved her, really loved her, and she smiled a trembly little smile — there was a chicken feather in her hair, like a pale flower petal — and his heart lifted. The next day at school, Elaine, tears running down her face, told him Junior Baxter had called her a whore, and he dragged Junior out of history class and thrashed him right there in the hallway in front of everyone and the principal threw him out of school, but Elaine took his hand and said if he had to go, then she was going too, and they walked out of there together, achingly in love, the only time he’d ever loved so hard or felt so loved in all his life.

Well, love. He doesn’t know what it is, only what it isn’t, and what it sometimes feels like. Back then, he was just trying to get into her pants, because he thought that was what guys were supposed to do. Now he knows that’s the least important thing. Everyone and everything fucks. Can’t help it, really. But, love: that’s the rare thing. The hard thing. And not God love, which is just a fake way of loving yourself. Human love. For someone else. Like he loves Elaine, without knowing what it is or even needing to know. Only kind of redemption he knows now, all he can hope for. He pulls over again, gets out, stretches, combs his fingers through his beard, climbs back in, touches his “Elaine” tattoo through his T-shirt for luck, tunes the radio to the local country music station. Why all these highfalutin thoughts? Be cause he is closing in on her once more and all the old anxieties are back. The urge to stop, turn around, and forget it. All along, he knows, it has been like the going was more important than getting there, with the where of the “there” being uncertain enough to give him an excuse always to change direction. Kidding himself. But not this time. For once he knows exactly where she is and knows she’s staying put. He has seen the fresh new sign pointing the way: “International Brunist Headquarters and Wilderness Camp Meeting Ground.” He either goes there now or throws his life away again. “No Trespassing”: that sign, too. Well, forgive us our trespasses, goddamn it to hell. He tosses his leather jacket in the back, takes down the plastic naked woman dangling from his rearview mirror and stows it in the glove compartment, starts up the truck again. Sniffs his armpits — fuck it, have to do. Pops some minty chewing gum in his mouth, which is mostly his way of brushing his teeth. The song on the scratchy old car radio is a religious one, sung by a bunch of young people. Sounds like a live recording not made in a studio. “Wings of a Dove.” He thought he heard the radio announcer, old Will Henry (that dumb rube still there — some things never change), say something about the Brunists, but he may not have heard right through the static.

Elaine is always most on his mind during Easter, and it was Easter morning about a month ago (he would have blamed the coincidence on God, if he still believed in God; instead he attributed it to luck and the way wanting something badly keeps you tuned in to the world) that his trek back here began. He had picked up a kitchen job in a fancy eatery just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in southern Virginia, the trail having gone cold somewhere east of the Smokies, and at work on Easter morning he’d spun the dial looking for some good music. Something about heartbreak and rough traveling, for he’d awakened feeling melancholic, adrift in an indifferent world, going nowhere. Nothing on the radio, however, except fucking church services, one after the other. It was that part of the country. He was about to turn it off when he heard a congregation singing Ben Wosznik’s old tune, “The White Bird of Glory,” the one that starts with the mine disaster. It was a live broadcast coming from a Brunist church in Lynchburg, and when the song was over, the preacher sent around the collection plate, asking for contributions to what he called the new Brunist Wilderness Camp and Headquarters. He gave their local church address for mailed-in contributions. “We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption to meet our dear Lord there face to face!” he declared, quoting the lines of the song, and apparently that was exactly what they meant to do. On the nineteenth of April. Buses were being chartered. Pach’ took off his apron and quit his job on the spot, thoroughly pissing off his employers, who were gearing up for their annual Easter buffet brunch. He headed to Lynchburg, intent on getting there before the service was over so he could talk to the preacher, that radio station tuned in the whole way. He made it in time to see a handful of fresh converts in Brunist tunics getting baptized by light and was able to corner the preacher after, but it wasn’t easy to get anything out of him. He was one of those smug greasy fucks with peroxide blond hair and a smarmy style, and Pach’ couldn’t hide his loathing of him. His own beardy unkempt appearance also put the preacher off; he could tell by the way his eyes narrowed when he took him in. Probably didn’t even smell all that good. It might have speeded things up to let it out that he was one of those twelve First Followers the preacher had blathered about in his sermon, but it would have taken too long to explain and he didn’t want to risk having Elaine alerted. Luckily, he had a few bucks in his pocket, so he took them out and said he’d heard what the preacher had said about the Brunist camp and he wanted to contribute to it, and that softened Blondie up enough to get what he wanted out of him. He’d have made it here sooner, but he had to earn gas money along the way and he had a lot of breakdowns. And, well, maybe, also, sure, the usual cold feet.

Not cured yet. At the turnoff into the camp, he nearly drives right on by. As if distracted. Thinking about tomorrow. Feeling hungry. Needing to clean up first. Wash the van. Whatever. But he brakes (more tents over there in a field, beat-up cars, a camper or two) and makes the turn. The gravel access road dips down slightly into a fresh-smelling leafy space. The camp is located in a wet bottomland fed by the No-Name Creek, which gave the camp its original name. They sometimes had problems in wet summers. The Baptists rented this campground from the Presbyterians each summer for four weeks in August, and he was a regular, rising eventually to camp counselor by the time he was a high school junior. The best four weeks he had each year. He was somebody, then. Ugliness was good. It was strong and knew the ropes. He was good with the younger kids, took them on hikes, showed them how to do things. He could probably still walk the whole camp blindfolded. There are wildflowers along the side of the road, patches of daffodils, bluebells deeper in. It’s a rich beautiful day. One of those days that makes you feel like you’re going to live forever. A T-shirt day. He has rarely seen the camp this time of year, though they used to hold the Easter sunrise services out here on Inspiration Point when all the churches joined in, and he turned up at a few, mainly to check out the girls of the other denominations.

He is stopped at the gate by some burly guy with a gun. Didn’t have those in his day. Didn’t have those barbed-wire fences with the “Keep Out” signs either. All along, he’s been afraid of being rejected. Or hoped to be. Now here it comes. In bib overalls, plaid shirt, and muddy boots. The guy wants to know his business and he knows he should say he is a believer and has made a kind of pilgrimage here, but he can’t get it out. Feels too phony. Instead, figuring Ben Wosznik would probably be the most friendly, he asks for him.

“Yeah? Who should I say…?”

“Tell him the name’s Palmers.”

“Palmers? Hey. Not Carl Dean Palmers?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll be durned!” The guy rests his shotgun on its stock and a grin breaks across his weathered face. “Well, praise God, brother. Welcome home. We been praying for you. This is some surprise. C’mon, I’ll take you to Brother Ben.”

He leaves the van by the gate, follows overalls into the camp on foot. There are other changes. Telephone poles and electric streetlamps. Phone box in front of the old stone lodge. Which looks spiffed up. The weeds have been beaten back. There’s a flower garden or two, bird feeders. The cedar cabins are under various stages of reconstruction. Some are missing, including the one he used to stay in as a camp counselor. Just the little cement support blocks left standing like miniature tombstones. Crowds of people milling about, busy with one thing or another. Lots of kids running around. Almost like a small town. They stare at him curiously, and his guide shouts out who he is and some smile and wave or come over to shake his hand, others frown or look confused or mutter amongst themselves. No one familiar, though five years is a long time. People change. He has. Elaine? He’d know her, no matter what, but no one like her in sight. Ben is working with a crew on one of the cabins. At first Ben doesn’t recognize him (Ben’s changed, too: thick gray beard now, fulltime spectacles, more of an old man’s shape), and then he does, and he gives him a warm, firm handshake. “Mighty glad to see you, Carl Dean. We thought you was still in the penitentiary.”

“Been out for a while. Heard you were back here and decided to stop by, say hello.”

“Well, I’m glad you did, son. Can you stay?”

“Got no special plans for right now. Could you use a hand there?”

“You bet. First, lemme take you to Clara.”

Walking alongside Ben toward the lodge, Pach’ finds himself feeling like a kid again. Almost like he ought to take Ben’s hand. Something about the old man. A kind of inner power. Certainty. Good guy to have at your side when trouble strikes. Serve time with. He can call you “son” and you don’t feel offended. The sort of dad he wishes he’d had.

The old lodge and dining hall has been done up on the inside, too. Still smells of fresh varnish. Used to have dangling yellow bulbs powered by a generator at the back; now it has proper lighting but also gas lanterns hanging from the beams. There’s a new coal stove at the back where some cots are stacked, piles of bedding. What most catches the eye, though, is a blown-up photograph hanging by the fireplace of Giovanni Bruno himself, standing out on the Mount in the rain, holding a coal pick like a mean cross, doing his ancient prophet act. Gives him a chill. Next to it is Ely Collins’ framed death note, the one that started it all. The trigger. Rocketed him straight into the fucking pen. Pach’ used to build the log fires in that big fireplace for their Baptist camp revival meetings, set out the folding chairs and put them back, clean up in the kitchen. Which, he can see at a glance, has also been modernized. Women are working in there. Large folding tables are being laid out for a meal. Ben explains that it’s a luncheon for the workers and invites him to join them. Pach’ tucks his ball cap in his back pocket, combs his fingers through his tangled hair.

Elaine’s mother seems less happy to see him. “We thought you was still in prison in solitary confinement, Carl Dean.” They are standing in a room off the main hall that has been fitted out with filing cabinets, desk, chairs, wire baskets full of paper, even a patterned red carpet. There are two young guys in there helping out. They seem excited he has turned up. “It’s what Colin said.”

“Colin likes to make things up, Mrs. Collins. I’ve been out for over two years.”

“Do tell.” Clara Collins seems hardly to have changed at all. A little bonier maybe, hair shorter and grayer, more business-like. Pants and sneakers instead of dress and heels. She casts a searching gaze over him, peering over her spectacles at his rags, his beard, his thinning but unruly hair. “Are you still a Christian, Carl Dean?”

“Well, I don’t know what else to call myself, ma’am. But I don’t have the same feeling anymore. It’s one reason I came back here.”

“What other reasons did you have?”

He knows he is turning red. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth he’ll just stammer something stupid. Finally, he says, “I wanted to see everybody again. I was lonely.”

That softens her up enough to bring a faint smile to her face and she pushes her glasses up on her nose and says, “Looks like you could use a good clean-up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have room here at the camp to put you up.”

“That’s okay. I sleep in my panel truck.”

“He’s just passing through,” Ben says. “He might could park down at the ballfield with us for a week or so while he thinks about staying on. Remember the parable of the hunderd sheep, Clara. It’s a honor to have the boy back with us.”

Mrs. Collins hesitates. Pach’ can read her mind: That’s too close to Elaine. But she sighs and nods. “Meanwhile, Darren and Billy Don here can show him about…”

Pach’ remembers Inspiration Point as higher than this. Back in his days as a camp counselor it seemed to him that you could see the whole universe from up here, and then he felt like part of it, it part of him. Now the universe makes him feel like a spot of birdshit. Far across the way, he can see the Deepwater tipple and hoist, poking into the blue sky like a fairground ride, the water tower glinting in the sun. Also the Mount of Redemption, off to one side of it. Doesn’t recall ever seeing that hill from up here but it must have been there. Goes to show that you see only what you’re ready to see. Or want to see. It’s the trouble with religious people.

He has managed to ditch Clara’s two helpers, telling them he needed some thinking time on his own; they seemed to appreciate that, being heavy thinkers themselves. Bible school dropouts named Darren Rector and Billy Don-something. Or maybe they were thrown out; their story is ambiguous. They want to interview him for the Brunist church history they’re assembling, a history they seem to think is going to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Something Pach’ hopes to avoid; he’d have to tell them what he really thinks and blow what little cover he has. But it seems important to them, so he said maybe, after he’s been here a while. This is his one shot at Elaine and he doesn’t want to ruin it with his big mouth, but if he can get her to leave with him, maybe he’ll let them have it just before he takes off.

The first thing they did was move his panel truck down to the trailer parking lot. The old softball field. He was sorry to see it being used like that, but he didn’t say so. He asked who else was parked there, learned a few new names. Mobile homes with coming-of-light bumper stickers. He wondered if Elaine was in the Collins’ house trailer but tried not to stare at it. Old bucktoothed Willie Hall came out to say hello and unleash a few welcoming Bible passages on him. He said his old mining injuries were plaguing him, which was why he couldn’t help out with the construction work. He was just waiting for God to take him up into Heaven, that’s all he had left now, and he held up his dogeared Bible to show him the weight of it. His big spooky wife did not come out. He saw her staring out their caravan window at him. He touched the bill of his cap to her, but no response. A filthy little kid who looked retarded stood a few yards away, not far from the Collins trailer, giving him a long dim look, snot running down his upper lip. Turned out to be Mrs. Cravens’ kid Davey, and he learned something more from the two boys about that sadsack woman and her current fellow. He went over and squatted down in front of Davey to say hello, remember me? Smelled like he might have filled his britches. “I’m Pach’, Davey. Let’s be friends, okay?” The kid nodded and licked his lip. He could see the Collins trailer steps and door over Davey’s shoulder. Should he go over and knock? No, he shouldn’t. Patience, jackass. Later.

Does she know he is here? Probably. Scuttlebutt gets around quickly in shut-up places like this. A lot like a prison, he has been thinking since he was led in through that barbed-wire fence. Maybe she’s hiding from him. Well, he can wait. He learned from the two boys that she and Junior Baxter still have something going, though they have only just got together again for the first time this past week, when the whole Baxter clan turned up for the anniversary celebrations over on the mine hill. Elaine is a very private person, they said. She and Young Abner, as he’s called now, are often seen together, but they never hold hands or even talk to each other. It’s more like a religious thing. It was the one called Billy Don who told him that, a talkative guy with dark shades, a ponytail, and handlebars; Darren is the more cautious one, a smart kid with blond curls and the bespectacled bright-eyed intensity of a zealot. The Baxter family are living in an unfinished cabin and were supposed to have left several days ago but haven’t. They passed it on the path leading up here. A tent up at the back. Two of the Baxter boys have already been kicked out of the camp, he learned. Something about a motorcycle gang, a robbery, a gun. In retaliation, they came back and vandalized the camp when everyone was over on the mine hill praying, which explains the beat-up look of some of the cabins. But Junior and his two sisters are still here. One of the girls was pointed out to him as they passed the cabin. Cute. She was staring at him, and when he glanced back a couple of minutes later, beginning the climb up here, he saw she was still staring at him.

On the walk up to the Point, the boys filled him in on the years of the Persecution, the international following they now have, Mrs. Collins’ plans for a tabernacle temple to be built on the Mount of Redemption. There was a lot of money being spent here, much of it apparently coming from a local rich guy named Suggs. But they were able to acquire the camp in the first place, they said, thanks to the Presbyterian minister’s wife, Mrs. Edwards, who arranged for the sale and then became a Brunist Follower. This was unexpected news. Reverend Edwards was the guy who helped kidnap his friend Colin Meredith and kept him away from the Mount on the Day of Redemption. Pach’ remembers him as a klutz in a porkpie. With a nervous smirk. All day on the hill, Pach’ kept worrying that Colin would miss the Rapture. He learned later that Colin tried to kill himself in their house. “Mrs. Edwards is one of our most important converts,” the boys said. “She’s now the camp director.” He remembers Mrs. Edwards very well. Nature girl. Fantasy stuff. When he asked, they told him she was probably working down at her vegetable garden with Colin. So Colin’s here, too: also news. They offered to walk him over there, but he told them he knew the way.

Pach’ once tried to kiss a girl up here on the Point when he was about ten, but she didn’t like it and didn’t kiss him back and told the camp counselor. Which ended his summer camp that year. He hasn’t had a lot of luck with kissing. Elaine was always more a hugger than a kisser, being self-conscious about her bad teeth. But she’s a good hugger. The most intense hug he ever got was over there on the mine road at the foot of the hill the night before the supposed end of the world — the night Bruno’s sister was killed. He’d got turned on watching people in front of the bonfires they’d built to sing and pray around, the way their bodies were silhouetted inside the thin flut-tery tunics when they passed in front of the flames. He was jealous of Elaine and hated it when she walked in front of the fires so others could see, but it excited him, too. Those were sinful thoughts, and on the very eve of what might well be the Last Judgment, so he tried not to look, but he couldn’t stop himself. Not until Elaine’s mother stood in front of the flames and he found himself staring at something he knew he shouldn’t see. He turned away feeling hot and confused, as if his acne were erupting all over his body. Then the lights on the mine road, the rush to the cars, the awful thing that happened. He stood at the lip of the ditch, hugging Elaine, watching that poor girl die. Her smallness, her lips slightly parted, eyes closed, her fragile broken worried look. How many had hit her? Had he? Wrecked cars everywhere, lights pointed in all directions, some straight up into the sky as if trying to get someone’s attention up there, his own car ditched somewhere behind him. Where it stayed until the county hauled it out weeks later and sent him a towing bill up in detention. Seeing his schoolteacher Mrs. Norton lying in the roadway as though dead, her fat-kneed husband fanning her face with his tunic hem, scared him even more than the struck girl. Was everybody suddenly dying? Was it really happening? Elaine was sobbing in his arms, her back to the ditch, and while he was staring down at Marcella over her shoulder, the poor girl’s eyes suddenly opened and a red bubble ballooned out of her mouth, popped, dribbled down her chin. And that was it. His knees began to shake. Her brother stooped to kiss her lips and rose up with blood on his mouth, that’s what he remembers, though his vision was pretty blurry, his head may have been playing tricks on him. Elaine wrapped her arms around him tight and held him close, close, dressed in almost nothing as they were, and whispered in his ear that she wanted to be in Heaven with him forever. Brought tears to his eyes as he, chastely, except for the club pressed against her tummy, couldn’t do anything about that, hugged her back. Forever turned out to be less than a day.

He turns his back on all that shitty history and takes the path down to where he supposes Mrs. Edwards’ vegetable garden to be, a trail somewhat overgrown, evidently not much used, in spite of the heavy traffic in the camp. Still a beautiful walk. Flowers, birds, trees, all kinds of sedges and grasses. Some of them pink now, this time of year. They all have names; he’ll never learn them. Though, if he stays here, maybe he’ll try. Mrs. Edwards had a thing for nature, as he recalls, she could teach him. She was a frequent visitor to the camp when the Baptists rented it. Came to see if they were taking proper care of it, he supposed, but always in a nice way. She was slim and pretty and dressed casually and he had fantasies about her, wishing for a mother like her, and sometimes he followed her around. One day, down in the wild place on the other side of the creek, she took her shirt off to sun her tits. He scrunched down in the weeds, stunned by the amazing sight, waiting and praying (yes, he was praying) for her to take the rest off. She never did, though over the years he saw other things. He used to wonder: What if he made himself known? Couldn’t be done. She was from another world. It was like trying to step into a movie. There was only the watching.

The vegetable garden is amazing. A little farm. Mrs. Edwards is seeding a newly hoed patch when he arrives and introduces himself. She’s older now, has a baggier look and a double chin, but there’s still something fresh and girlish about her. She seems glad to see him, lights up with a cheerful smile. “Colin! Look who’s here!” she calls out. Colin comes over from where he has been setting out stakes alongside a small freckle-faced woman. Colin was always odd looking, but now he’s weirder than ever. Sickly pale and skinny with a wispy Chinaman’s beard, wearing a floppy straw sun hat and rose-colored shorts, his silvery blond hair fluttering about his shoulders like a mad woman’s. The way he moves reminds him of Sissy. Of course. Why hadn’t he realized that before? Didn’t understand any of this back then. A complete greenass. “It’s Carl Dean, Colin!” Colin stops dead in his tracks, his eyes popping, his face twisting up like he’s about to have a fit. “No! It isn’t!” he cries and then runs away, screaming wildly for help. Mrs. Edwards throws down her garden gloves and starts after him, turning back just for a moment to cast Pach’ a dark scowl. “Who are you really?” she demands, then returns to the chase. He shrugs at the freckle-faced woman, who only stares back at him. Well. There went his gardening career.

His building career shows more promise. With help from Ben and the others, all strangers to him, Pach’ has been able to step right in with the crew this afternoon and work beside them. The cabin they are working on, which used to house eight kids in bunk beds, is being remodeled for use as a medical treatment room and two-bed sick bay. There are scores of people hanging about, most of whom seem to have come for last Sunday’s ceremonies and just haven’t gone home again. When they offer to help, Ben sizes them up quickly, assigns tasks to those who seem they might actually contribute something and sends the others off on pointless errands to get them out of the way. Even unskilled as he is, there’s a lot Pach’ can do. The cabin has already been wired up for electricity, and Wayne Shawcross, the overalled guy who let him in here, is showing him how to install wall plugs and light fixtures. Ben has also taken him on as a kind of apprentice carpenter. He’s strong, and that’s appreciated, too. He’s enjoying it, more than any other work he’s done since he got out, and in spite of the luncheon blow-up, he can already feel the urge to want to stay and work with all these guys whom he’s quickly come to like. Get the job done. Be part of something bigger than himself. How much of religion, he wonders, is about this feeling?

At the luncheon earlier, over baloney sandwiches and potato salad, they made a big fuss over him, treating him as a kind of returning hero. It was embarrassing, given his intentions, and he only wanted out of there. Clara made a welcoming introduction and led them in prayer, thanking God for Carl Dean’s safe return, and then prayed for all the other things they wanted. Darren Rector, reciting a little church history, praised him for his brave attack on the powers of darkness, which he said helped many others to escape arrest and carry on with their evangelical work (he didn’t know that), and expressed everyone’s sympathy for his suffering on behalf of them all. Which Rector compared to the ordeals of Daniel and Samson and Paul. Not at all how it was, of course. He supposed Rector was just buttering him up for the interview. Elaine wasn’t there — still avoiding him, maybe — but just as well. He was glad she didn’t have to listen to all that horseshit. Mrs. Edwards wasn’t there either, nor Colin. The word about what had happened in the garden had evidently gotten around; the hero worship was not unanimous. There were surly mutterings here and there, and Junior’s glare was so fierce it could have cut through steel plate, his short-cropped red head looking like it was on fire from inner rage. He’s younger than Pach’, but he’s already getting an old man’s soft heaviness in the jowls and belly and now wears a little red tuft on his upper lip. His kid sister, on the other hand, gave Pach’ a sweet lingering smile. Somewhat vague. It just sort of stayed on her face. Her food had to be cut for her. Not all there.

Then an old fart in a wheelchair rolled away from the Baxter table and wanted to know in a loud voice if he really was Carl Dean Palmers like he said he was. His friend had not only not recognized him, he’d screamed like he’d seen the devil, scaring the whole camp. They’d all seen pictures. He didn’t look like the pictures. So who was he really? Ben said he was Carl Dean, all right. They’d had a long conversation, talking about the last time they were together, couldn’t be anyone else. “The devil is a great dissembler, Brother Ben!” Then Bernice Filbert, the widowed sister-in-law of the guy who owns the garage where he fixed up his van, the lady with the penciled eyebrows and the fancy way of talking who dresses up like Bible characters, vouched for him as well. “He has put on more beard and forehead since he stayed with us, but you can tell by his appetite he is who he is,” she said, trying to lighten things up. “He has just put away his lunch quicker than Ezekiel could eat a scroll, as like I told him then.” She’s the camp nurse and is something of a celebrity today for having got fired a couple of nights ago as the home care nurse for the town banker’s wife. All in some cause or other. Whatever, Pach’ is on her side. It’s enough just because the chump’s a banker. Bastards who rule the world by making money off other people’s money, a kind of legalized theft. They ought to be hung. Or sent to work in the mines. But also because the banker’s dickhead son and his fatcat pals were the ones who laid the nickname of Ugly on him back in high school, getting rid of it being one of the few positives of his prison stretch. “That woman cain’t talk ’thout lyin’,” someone said, and someone else mumbled something about his driving the “devil’s van.” “What I’m asking,” the guy in the wheelchair insisted, “is can he prove it?” Pach’ tossed his driver’s license out on the table and the cripple said that didn’t prove anything, and then everyone started shouting, accusing the geezer of spoiling Carl Dean’s homecoming and trying to sow discord in the camp. On the one hand, Pach’ agreed with the old fossil; he sure as hell wasn’t Carl Dean Palmers anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. On the other, if the cantankerous sonuvabitch hadn’t been in a wheelchair, he’d have popped him. He got up to leave, but Ben put a hand on his shoulder and reminded everyone of their Christian obligations to one another and then put his guitar around his neck and led them all in singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” After a moment, Abner Baxter stood up and joined in, and then, reluctantly, so too did the others at his table. All except the guy in the wheelchair, who spun it around, turning his crooked back on them.

Now, while Pach’ works with Ben on the new sick bay, Baxter and his pals across the way are trying to hang a front door on their cabin, and neither crew is talking much to the other. People aren’t getting along, just like before, and trouble is brewing. Ben sees him watching them with a frown on his face and says, “Let them be, Carl Dean. They ain’t much good to us anyhow, so we at least get some work out of them for the time being. But that cabin has got other purposes. They ain’t staying there.”

Could he, he wonders? Stay here? Stay in this camp where he’s always felt most at home, here with all these friends, more like family than his own family? Could he go all the way, put a tunic on again, win Elaine, help defend Ben and Mrs. Collins against the abominable Baxters and the local establishment, build something that will last? While he’s asking himself that, Clara Collins comes rushing out of the lodge with big news: Mr. Suggs just called. The mine owners have accepted their offer for the Mount of Redemption. Papers are being drawn up. There are whoops and cheers and Wayne throws his painter’s cap in the air. Time to bring out the beers! But, no, not here. Mrs. Collins falls to her knees there in the woodchips and closes her eyes and lifts her hands and launches into her full-throated God howl and all the others drop to their knees too and join in, waving their arms about and praying to beat the band. An old coalminer from out east declares it’s a miracle, and that is noisily amenned. Mr. Suggs is grandly Godblessed. Nothing Pach’ can do but follow suit, get down on his knees, take off his cap, and tuck his chin in, anything else would be an insult to these people, but he’s feeling awkward as hell, a total hypocrite, the devilish reprobate they have taken him to be. Fuck. He could never do this.

When Pach’ reaches the flowering dogwood tree a little before sundown for Saturday evening prayers, she is already there. Standing beside her mother. All these years gone past, mostly thinking about her, and suddenly here she is. He’d thought, after so much buildup, he’d probably be disappointed, and he’d arrived, hands in pockets, talking to others, trying not to look her way, staying cool. That lasted about a minute. She has grown up some. Taller now than he is. Gangly, but not big-boned like her mother. She’s staring straight at him in a forthright way he has not seen before. He doesn’t know what that stare means, but it cheers him to see her there beside her mother and not by Junior Baxter. He nods to her as though in recognition, and when she doesn’t nod back, he looks away.

“Looks like you brung us luck, Pach’,” Wayne Shawcross says with a grin, passing by with his wife, Ludie Belle, and Pach’ grins back, feeling a kind of twitch in his cheek (the grin’s too wide, it’s not something he does often), and says, “I can give it to others but I never keep none for myself.” Ben and Clara still speak of him as Carl Dean, but he introduces himself to people as Pach’, which is his name for his new life. “You mean like what you got there on the knees of your jeans?” Wayne asked this afternoon when told his name. “No. Like Apache.” “You part injun?” “That’s what they told me.” “I think my granmaw was probly half Choctaw, but she wouldn’t never admit it. It was like being half nigger back then.” He’d got the new handle in prison. He’d lied and told them he had Indian blood, partly just to set himself off from the others, partly to shuck off the old life, be someone other than the self he’d come to hate. And who knows, given his old lady’s careless habits, maybe it was true — didn’t she like to claim when she was drunk that she’d got pregnant with him off a toilet seat? He was the only virgin in the men’s prison, where rape was part of the new-boys break-in rituals, and he meant to stay that way (didn’t quite), but he had to fight for it. Five guys, including a couple of trusties, grabbed him and ripped his pants down and the biggest of them said, “Bend over, Tonto, I’m gonna stick it to your holy huntin’ ground.” He was able to tear himself free and laid into the lot of them, starting with the fat asshole who called him Tonto, leaving him with less teeth in his mouth than he had before, and he was still holding his own against all five, even with his pants around his ankles, when the bulls finally showed up and broke it up with chains and truncheons. Lost him any hope for parole that year, but it earned him the nickname of the Crazy Apache, which over time got shortened to Pach’, which most people hear as Patch. Whatever. Just so it’s not Carl Dean. Or Ugly.

Elaine is still staring at him. He tries a smile this time. Same result. He has showered and laundered his rags in the new camp laundry, trimmed his beard, put on a T-shirt with only a couple of holes, and a denim vest. Combed his hair, even. Ben dropped a Brunist tunic by for him, but he decided not to wear it. There are others without tunics, so apparently it’s okay. Two of those are a country singer and his woman, who are said to be famous singers from Nashville, though he hasn’t heard of them. They’re first on the program, because they have a gig after. At the bar in the old Blue Moon Motel at the edge of town. Can’t be too famous. But a place to escape to maybe for a beer. What he misses most this time of day. They seem cool. The guy, anyway. The woman is mixed up with the fortuneteller, Mrs. Hall, and her flock of gossipy widows. Came to the prayer meeting in their company. She’s said to be in touch with the dead.

The days are lengthening and the sun is probably still shining on Inspiration Point above them, but twilight has already settled on this little grove down here in the valley behind the lodge, oddly making the dogwood flowers seem to glow, and Elaine, standing under them, seems to glow as well. How beautiful she is in this strange pale light. Now he’s the one staring and she’s the one to look away. He can feel Junior Baxter’s seething fury off to one side, but it means nothing to him. She’s here and he’s here. That’s all that matters. On his way from lunch to the work site, Ben saw him craning about and said, “I s’pose you’re looking for Elaine. She ain’t feeling all that sociable today. Be careful, son. I think your coming here has gave her a fright. She’ll be at the prayer meeting tonight. You’ll see her there.” All afternoon he has been plotting out what he’d say to her when they finally met, how he loves her, needs her, or else how he just wants to be friends again, have someone to talk to, whatever seems most likely to work, but all that has vanished from his head, and he knows it will all happen without a word or it won’t happen at all.

There is apparently something sacred about the tree, which is why they are meeting here. The two country singers do a song about it. “All who see it will think of Me / Nailed to a cross from a dogwood tree…” The easy familiar singing mellows Pach’ out (it was right to come here), and when they follow that with a singalong version of “In the Garden,” he joins in. Old campfire standby. And the joy we share as we tarry there (he is watching Elaine, who is not singing; her head is down and she looks thin and fragile and he longs to gather her into his arms and take care of her), none other has ever known…

“Now, my son, the Lord be with thee, and prosper thou, and build the house of the Lord thy God, as he hath said of thee.” This is Wayne Shawcross reading from the Old Testament, somewhat laboriously, his finger tracing the lines in the dim light, about somebody building a church. Could be referring to building the camp, but, after the news today, it’s the tabernacle idea that has them buzzing. “Moreover there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and workers of stone and timber, and all manner of cunning men for ever manner of work.” Sure. Cunning. Count me in. Wayne plows on in his wooden monotone: “Arise therefore, and build ye the sanctuary of the Lord God, to bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and the holy vessels of God, into the house that is to be built to the name of the Lord.” There are a lot of amens and praise Gods now, people are getting excited, even though they probably don’t know what arks and vessels Wayne is talking about. Elaine’s head is up, a kind of startled expression on her face, but she is not joining in. A woman with a glass eye and gold tooth is watching her, head cocked, as if trying to decipher the expression. “The Lord hath chosen thee to build a house for the sanctuary: be strong, and do it!”

As Wayne looks up from his reading, pocketing his spectacles, the amens raining down, Elaine’s mother steps into the ruckus and in her sharp clear voice starts to spell out what she calls the glad tidings about acquiring the Deepwater mining property and what that means to them. She gets about two lines out. “And I heerd a great voice outa Heaven saying, behold!” That’s little Willie Hall interrupting. Can’t hold him back, never could. “The tabernacle a God is with men, and he will dwell with ’em and they shall be his people, and God hisself shall be with ’em and be their God! Ay-men! Revelation 21:3!” People are shouting at him, goading him on. Clara can’t get a word in edgewise. It’s already turning into another one of those nights, just like old times, though now Pach’ feels more like a self-conscious tourist. “Tell it like it is, Brother Willie!” “Let ’em bring me up onto thy holy hill,” he cries, pointing, his big ears standing out like signal flags, “and to thy tabernacle! Psalms 43:3!” Abner Baxter raises his fist to speak, evidently keen to unload a few verses of his own, but the two singers take it as a cue to do another number: “The Sons of Light Are Marching.” The song they sang on the march out to the hill that terrible morning. Pach’ led the parade, walking backwards, bellowing at the top of his lungs so they could hear him all the way to the back. Hammering the ruts and gravel of the mine road with his bare feet as though to say goodbye to both road and feet. Must have hurt. Doesn’t remember. Remembers Elaine marching right there at the front, watching him, almost desperately, singing with him in her timid little voice, the dead body they were carrying in the folded lawnchair rocking along above and behind her like a kind of canopy, the Prophet’s gaga mother beside her being pulled over the bumps in a little red wagon, helicopters rattling in the sky overhead, photographers and newsmen and the curious trailing along beside them, the whole mad procession watched by state troopers in black uniforms and white visored helmets. “O the sons of light are marching since the coming of the dawn,” Pach’ sings now, joining in. “Led by Giovanni Bruno and the voice of Domiron!” But he’s the only one who does it that way. The others sing: “Led by Giovanni Bruno, we shall go marching on!” So Domiron’s out. The rest of Mrs. Norton’s contributions as well, probably. He decides to shut up until he gets the whole picture. “So come and march with us to Glory!” Their own battle hymn. Not a song to tamp down the emotions, but it brings a certain order to them, makes them less dangerous, even as it stirs them up. Somehow it’s the rhymes that do that, like little fasteners. Buttons. “For the end of time has come!”

When the song is over, Duke and his woman wave their goodbyes. “Peace!” Duke says. Pach’ wants to leave with them, needs a beer, relief from all this shit, but he can’t, wouldn’t look right, and he still has hopes of connecting with Elaine. Runny-nosed Davey Cravens comes over and stands beside him, takes his hand. “You’re my friend,” he says, looking up at him. Big Hunk Rumpel, Mrs. Cravens’ current man, rumbles forward in his split tunic and takes Davey up by the scruff. “It’s okay,” Pach’ says, but Hunk just turns away and hauls the kid on up the path toward the lodge, the boy yelping and bawling all the way. Hunk never seems to say much, but at work today he took to Pach’ right away and Pach’ felt adopted by him. Respect of strength for strength. The old prison code. Maybe Hunk’s done time too. Seeing what just happened to Davey, Hunk is not much improvement on the old man Pach’ got stuck with, but he’s someone you might want to have in your corner when things get tough.

Before Mrs. Collins can pick up where she got cut off, Abner Baxter starts up a rant of his own, like he’s been threatening to do all along. He doesn’t say so, but his Bible quotes seem to equate the temple idea with idol worship. That’s how Pach’ reads them anyway, and the look on Clara’s face suggests it’s how she reads them too. Elaine watches her mother with some alarm, her hand at her mouth, her shoulders hunched, while Baxter rails against pride and vanity and speaks up for the poor. “And therefore I command you, saith the Lord, thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land!” He is getting a lot of shouted amens and some people start clapping in rhythm to all his “thy’s.” This probably has something to do with how their money is to be spent. It came up at lunch, too. People who want a place to stay, not another church. Pach’ can only watch. He’s on the other side of the world from these people now. Baxter turns toward his constituents, raising both arms. He is angry about the use of sheriff’s troops to clear the tents off the Mount of Redemption and sealing it off and he thunderously says so. Pach’ only wishes he could go take Elaine’s hand and lead her out of here.

Who comes to take his hand, walking over in front of everyone, is Baxter’s daughter, Amanda. She presses up beside him and says she wants to be his friend, too. In this half-light they may not notice how red his face is, must be, and how his acne’s flaring up. He looks around in the sudden silence for help. He’s afraid Elaine might get the wrong idea. Certainly Amanda’s father seems to have got the wrong idea; he’s sputtering and his face is puffed up like he’s about to have a fit, his stupid son boiling up beside him. Luckily, the other Baxter girl, the older frumpy one, quietly takes charge. “She’s kinda simple,” she mutters by way of apology, and leads the girl away, and Pach’ thanks her. All these crazy kids. Pach’ is beginning to feel like the Pied Piper. Of course, people didn’t like the Pied Piper either, did they?

Elaine puts her arms around him and hugs him close. She tells him tearfully how much she loves him, how she’s missed him. Don’t ever leave me again, Carl Dean. She calls him Carl Dean? Probably. Pach’ doesn’t seem right. She’s such a tender fragile person, she can’t even imagine savage Indians. When he slides his hand down to hold her little bottom, she doesn’t complain. She presses closer to him and releases a little gasp, a kind of sob. He can feel her tummy pushing against him. “I love you, Elaine,” he whispers, and she trembles and grips him tightly as the sweet night closes down around them. He tugs gently at her bottom to rub her tummy against his hard-on. He desperately wants her to take it in her mouth. But would she, could she? No, but Sissy does, lapping lovingly at it with his little puppy tongue. Pach’ is somewhat alarmed by this, and he pauses to worry about it. He spent a lot of time and spunk jerking off in prison, but otherwise he stayed clean. Except for little Sissy, as they called him. Her. Sissy was more girl than guy and the men called him “she” and “her,” and eventually Pach’ did, too, but never in ridicule. Sissy had a little dick and it got hard like a pencil stub when he was excited, but he was curvy and cuddly with innocent blue eyes and puckery lips and a snow-white bottom, soft and round as a girl’s. “Sissy” was for “Sister,” both as in family and in nun: he liked to dress up like one, using prison blankets. Even the screws thought this was funny, and several of them were probably serviced by Sissy in that costume. He was in for drugs and as an accessory to murder, a murder committed by his boyfriend, whom he then tried to hide. His boyfriend died in a drug-crazed shootout with the cops, and Sissy was taken in. And one sad and lonely night when Pach’ could not stop thinking about Elaine, Sissy took him in his mouth and he let him do that. Sissy said he’d never seen one that big and it almost frightened him. Eventually he had Sissy in other ways, too, but always while thinking about Elaine. And now, lying in the back of his van only yards away from her (he has been unable to take his gaze away from the lighted windows of their trailer, even though the blinds are pulled) and humping his pillow while fantasizing about her, it is Sissy who has taken her place. That’s weird, and he doesn’t think he likes it. Sissy eventually got a tattoo of a little heart with a large Indian arrow through it and the words CRAZY APACHE — not over his heart, but on his little white left cheek, otherwise without a blemish. Sissy cried when Pach’ left prison and Pach’ felt bad, too. Poor little Sissy. Oh, what the hell. Out of affection, Pach’ lets him finish up.

The first time he blew his wad it was like an accident and he didn’t know what was happening. He thought he’d been visited by angels. His old lady, who was not otherwise very religious, had a thing about angels and other supernatural creatures, and he was still pretty susceptible to all that. He sometimes thought he heard angels in his room, flying around like bats. Maybe they were bats. When he started getting serious about Christianity at the Baptist Church, it felt like growing up, and he looked down on his superstitious mother after that, though actually all he’d done was stop believing in Rudolph while sticking with Santa Claus. Then along came Mrs. Norton, who introduced him to Santa’s big daddy Domiron off in some other dimension, therewith offering him access to possibilities beyond his pathetic fucked-up smalltown life and making him feel like some kind of privileged highbrow. He finally got rid of all that crap in prison. Reading the Bible helped. One of the few books you could have in stir. He decided to plow straight through it, beginning to end. He read first with a certain awe (this has been the book for twenty centuries!), then with increasing irritation (who wrote this stupid thing?), finally with disgust and anger. A total swindle. Blaming God for writing it is a fucking sacrilege. Got interested in troublemakers instead. Which was just about anybody who got anything done. Jesus, for example, the wildass bastard. Before checking out, he got a pep talk in his cell from the prison chaplain, who interrupted him while he was saying goodbye to Sissy, and he let the bastard have it. “Jesus was all right,” he said, “but Christ sucks.” When the chaplain left, shaking his head, Sissy started giggling and bawling hysterically at the same time and told him he was completely crazy. His Crazy Apache.

Should he open another beer? He shouldn’t. Only half a six-pack left and no easy way to get more. Not much money for buying it even if he should break out of this place for a time, and as long as he helps out here with the building, no way to earn more. He has at least been well fed. Wayne Shawcross and Ludie Belle invited him to stop by their house trailer after the prayer meeting for something extra to eat. She’s in charge of the camp kitchen and has a well-stocked fridge. She probably keeps a bottle somewhere, too, but he didn’t want to ask. Not yet. Same with telling them about Elaine. They are good people, and he wanted to talk with them straight out about his feelings — they’d seen what he did after the prayer meeting — and he even thought he might show them his tattoo, but when they asked him what he was doing here, he told them what he’d told Elaine’s mother. Which is also true. He has been lonely. And both of them seem like pretty serious believers, Wayne especially, so he has to be careful.

The lights have gone out in the Collins trailer, which looms imperiously over him, aglow in the light of the full moon. In his imagination she sleeps in her Brunist tunic. The one she was wearing on Easter night all those years ago. When he thinks of her, that cotton fabric is what his fingers feel. Tonight, when the prayer meeting ended, he got up his nerve and walked over to her, his hands in his pockets, to say hello. It was an awkward moment with everyone watching and he knew his acne was flaring up. When he was actually in front of her, he couldn’t think of what to say. He found it difficult to look into her eyes, but when he dropped his eyes, there was her body draped in the thin tunic, and that confused him all the more. Finally he just nodded and said, “Hi, it’s me.” Elaine only stared at him as if he’d just threatened to kill her, and without saying a word, left immediately with her mother. Well, he thought, at least she didn’t tell him to go away. It’s only his first day. He can be patient. Meanwhile, he has opened another beer. It’s Easter night, the moon’s filling up the sky, and they’re in his car again. She’s trembling, but she has been through this before, and is ready now. “Stay the fuck out of this,” he says to Sissy. “Go take a walk and don’t come back until I blink the lights.”

II.3 Sunday 26 April — Wednesday 29 April

“Come on, Billy Don, how can you not hear it? It’s right there, clear as a bell!”

“Well, that bell is just not ringing for me.” Yet again, for the umpteenth time, Brother Abner Baxter says: “…cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” “Honest, Darren, all I hear is a kind of hissing sound.”

“Exactly!”

“But it’s not anybody saying anything. It’s just a kind of noise. Might even be part of how Reverend Baxter is saying ‘darkness.’”

“No, it comes after, Billy Don. It’s her! I’m telling you!”

“Maybe you got better ears than me.”

“Maybe I have.” Sometimes Billy Don seems plain stupid. “But there’s more! Listen!”

Listen! That’s the whispered word Darren hears behind the powerful bass tones of the preacher: Listen! It is she. He knows it. The voice in the ditch. Marcella. They both have trouble saying her name. It is as though she has passed beyond the nominal, is mysteriously just “she.” Less than she. Or more. An aura. The displaced voice of the mystical figure pointing to Heaven in the painting in Reverend Clegg’s Florida church. A voice in pain. The recording, dated and catalogued, as are all their tapes, is the one from a week ago down at the foot of the mine hill during the arrival on the Day of the Sacrifice of Reverend Baxter and his family. Billy Don was holding the microphone, his own flat, ugly voice blocking out the others until Darren shushed him (maybe that’s the sound Darren keeps hearing, Billy Don thinks: his own shushing). “Do ye likewise, my friends, while there is still time for your souls to be saved!” Abner Baxter is urging on the tape. There’s a tiny pause between “friends” and “while,” and Darren backs it up and plays it again. “Do you hear it, Billy Don?”

“Sure. Reverend Baxter wants everybody to put on the armor of light.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Pay attention!” He plays it again, growing impatient with Billy Don. He’s doing this on purpose. It’s that evil girl. She’s corrupting his soul. “Between those two words, that girl’s voice, saying ‘to me.’ It’s just a whisper, but you can’t miss it!”

“Yeah, okay, I hear it now.” On the table between them is a blurry photograph of all the people on the mine road taken from the top of the hill, Darren having appropriated the dead woman’s box camera before anyone noticed. The old lady’s lens had been amateurishly aimed toward the sun and Darren presumably sees a ghostly presence in the consequent flare of light. “But why do you think it’s a girl’s voice? It’s most likely one of those old women standing around, but you can’t hear her except when Reverend Baxter stops to catch his breath.”

“No, listen again. No one at the camp has a weird breathy voice like that. No one alive, anyway.”

“‘Do ye likewise, my friends…’ (…to me…) ‘while there is…’”

Okay, it’s there. But so what? Ever since they met, Billy Don has shared Darren’s scientific quest for eschatological truth, and he was just as curious as Darren was when Patti Jo said she could hear the dead girl speaking to her from the ditch that day, but Darren is losing him on this one. Darren has played and replayed these mine road tapes all week, hoping he might have picked up her voice, pressing on long after Billy Don had given up. At the Sunday service this morning, after Brother John P. Suggs had confirmed for everybody the final acquisition of the Mount of Redemption and the anonymous gift that will make possible the building of their temple on it, setting off a burst of rapturous praise-giving, Patti Jo got up with her friend Duke to lead everyone in singing “Higher Ground,” and Billy Don, humming along in his tuneless fashion, found himself thinking about the way Patti Jo said she communicated with Marcella’s spirit. “Marcella doesn’t use words exactly. It’s more like she’s just thinking and I can sort of sense what she’s thinking. I know that sounds weird, but it feels completely natural.” So nothing really said, just a kind of shared thereness, and if that’s so, he wondered, watching Patti Jo’s breasts bob about under her white blouse (when they interviewed her, the poor woman had a lot of sad stories to tell — she’s had a tough life and it shows on her face — but she still has a lot of bounce and it’s fun to watch her sing), why did Darren think they would hear a voice when she didn’t? We’re not all mediums, Darren said. If it’s important, like Patti Jo says the voice says it is, then the spirit has to get through however it can.

It’s how he thinks. There’s no answer, just belief or damnation. Like now, when Darren replays the “still time for your souls” bit and says, “If you listen close, you can hear her struggling to be heard while the others are carrying on, like a kind of strangled squeaky sound.”

“I think that might be the little Baxter kid. He was having a fit or something.”

“I don’t think so, but even if it were, as I’ve tried to explain, Billy Don, that would only mean she might have been trying to reach us through him and it wasn’t quite working.”

“You mean like he was sorta possessed.”

Darren sighs irritably.

Billy Don gazes out the window of their church office, which is still also their bedroom, the Baxters having commandeered their designated cabin with no signs of giving it up. No matter. Mr. Suggs has promised them a camper, which is a better deal anyway. It’s woodsy and late-April green out there, a jean-jacket getup-a-ballgame day, not a day to be stuck in here. Darren is growing exasperated with him, he knows, but though Darren is smarter than he is and he’s usually right, he’s trying too hard to make something out of nothing. It’s not just these mine road tapes. Darren has been puzzling through all their interviews and their field recordings of conversations picked up on the Mount and around the dogwood tree and everything else he thinks might contain secret messages. He had Billy Don set up the tape recorder in the ditch, where they left it overnight, hoping to pick up the ghostly whispering they could not hear by day, but the tape ran out and the battery died before they got anything. Darren claimed to hear strange rustlings, but when Billy Don said, “Rabbits probably,” Darren just got mad. Darren has also been counting all the words and letters in the original sayings of the Prophet, as well as those in the slightly different versions preached by Sister Clara and the others, subtracting one from the other to see if there is any pattern in what he is calling “the residue of corruption.” Darren is not as hot on Sister Clara as he once was. He has turned all the letters of each of the seven prophecies in both versions into numbers, has asked Billy Don to do a lot of adding and subtracting and averaging and figuring out ratios and square roots, then converted the numerical values of the differences back into letters again, and he has performed the same kinds of operations on Ely Collins’ final death note, focusing especially on the words with improper capitals and misspellings. “If this message comes from God, Billy Don, and I believe that it truly does, for a great religion has been born from it, then we have to assume God makes spelling mistakes only on purpose!” Darren calls it the ancient Greek science of isopsephia, dating clear back to the Sibylline Oracles, which exactly predicted the birth of Jesus Christ centuries before it happened. This was amazing; Billy Don was impressed.

Now Darren is replaying “while there is still time for your souls to be saved,” and at the end there is just enough of a pause to hear the word “week” or something like it. Billy Don has less trouble with this one, he just isn’t so sure where it’s coming from. Before he can say so, though, Darren has already moved ahead to the next break. Oh oh. Billy Don gets it now. “You hear it, Billy Don?”

“Yup.”

“‘Of Sundays!’” There’s a kind of glow about Darren when he gets excited. His blue eyes seem to grow bigger behind his little round spectacles and it’s like you can look right through them into the sparkly cavern of his head. He backs up the tape and plays it again. “‘Listen… to me! …A week…of Sundays!”’ Darren whispers, imitating the voice. “That’s what she was trying to tell us, Billy Don! Just like the Prophet!”

“Wait. Let me hear that again. Are you sure it’s Sundays? Sounds more like it’s got an ‘m.’ Like ‘some days.’”

“Don’t be dumb, Billy Don! What could that possibly mean? This makes complete sense. You can even hear her say ‘again’ a moment later. ‘Listen to me!A week of Sundays…again!’ Hear it?”

“But, well, that’s not exactly what her brother said. He said, ‘Sunday week.’”

“That’s right. ‘Coming of Light, Sunday week.’ But it turned out to be a week of Sundays, or seven weeks after the Day of Redemption.”

“June the seventh.”

“June the seventh. The Midnight Coming. When everybody gathered together five years ago all around the world. It was even bigger in terms of numbers than the Day of Redemption.” Darren’s voice has begun to sound like the wheezy voice in the ditch.

“Six weeks from today.” Billy Don tugs on the end of his moustache. Could it be? Was the spirit of the dead girl really trying to reach them? It’s possible. And scary. It means the Rapture might be even closer than they have been supposing. Nothing was to have happened for another couple of years at least. If it’s true and not just something Darren is making up, he doesn’t have much time to acquaint himself fully with the ways of the world and find a partner for eternity. It’s like he’s aged suddenly from twenty-two to eighty-two overnight. He pushes these doomsday thoughts aside and concentrates on the Prophet’s sister instead. Though they never knew her, and she’s a saint and completely dead, whenever Billy Don thinks about Marcella Bruno it is not her spirit that comes foremost to mind, or even the beautiful painting in the Florida church, but her radiant nude body in their secreted photos of her on the leather couch, photos he peeks at ev ery chance he gets — as God’s disciple and exegete, of course, seeking truth and understanding. As soon as Darren leaves, he’ll get them out again, examine them for further revelations. And use the new office phone, give Sally Elliott another call. He wants to ask her about all this. And thinking about the end makes him feel bad (he’s not eighty-two, darn it), and she always has something funny or smart to say that cheers him up. “So what do you think? Something’s gonna happen that day?”

“I don’t know, Billy Don. I’m kind of scared. I need your help.”

When Darren asked Clara what happened to Marcella’s body, she didn’t know. “When things settle down here, we can maybe ask.” Though some believe the Day of Redemption was the beginning of the Rapture and Marcella was transported directly to the Kingdom of Light, Clara, while allowing that it could be so, doubts it would have happened unwitnessed. Well, she is a good woman but she has a more naïve view of God’s transparency than they do. “But why was the girl out there on the mine road all alone in the first place?” Billy Don wanted to know. “Why wasn’t she with everybody else?” “She’d took sick, bless her soul. We was planning to take her out there the next day with us, but it was only the day before and we didn’t want her to worsen. We probly oughter left somebody to watch over her, but I guess they was too much else to think on.” “What kind of sick?” Darren asked. They didn’t get an answer to that, though before she went back to Florida they overheard Betty Wilson Clegg say she believed the poor child really died of heartbreak. They feel fairly certain, after seeing the forbidden photos, what she meant by that, but they also think that Mrs. Clegg is something of a simpleton, and Darren in particular believes that such banalities trivialize God’s operations among humankind. God is not a ladies’ romance writer. They have conducted sit-down interviews with many of the Brunists in their effort to capture the early history of the movement, but Sister Clara is always too busy for long conversations, so Darren has made a habit of simply leaving the recorder running whenever she’s in the office, and maybe she knows that and maybe she doesn’t. She has said some things about Abner Baxter that suggest she doesn’t, or else she forgets.

Reverend Baxter is one of those who believe the Prophet’s sister and First Martyr was taken up bodily into Heaven. Billy Don has speculated that’s because it relieves his guilt about the accident, but that just shows how earthbound Billy Don still is. The plain fact is that Brother Abner is a pre-Tribulation dispensationalist and Clara Collins is more post-Trib, so he would naturally expect Marcella to be taken immediately into the presence of the Lord, whereas Clara would suppose she’d have to wait for everybody else. It’s as simple as that. Darren doesn’t like Abner Baxter any more than Billy Don does, but he never lets personal feelings interfere with his pursuit of absolute truth, an attitude much like Reverend Baxter’s, though Darren is more of a searcher, while Reverend Baxter is, well, a preacher. Darren and Billy Don are, as they like to say, dialoguing with history, but Billy Don believes there are as many histories as there are people and all of them are true, history being made up of memories and the recording of memories, which is why he is enthusiastic about their project. It also means the real truth will always elude him. Darren knows that they live in two kinds of time at once: human clock time and cosmic eternity. And though any understanding of the mysteries of eternity demands an accurate knowledge of clock time — history being a kind of obscure reflection of metahistory, as he likes to call it, having learned the word in Bible School — the seeming paradoxes of clock time are resolved only when absorbed as unities within timeless eternity. Reverend Baxter, in his blustery way, seems tuned in to that. He also adheres strictly to the original sayings of the Prophet, to the extent that they were written down or could be remembered. Darren is impressed by this faithfulness to prophetic utterance. Sister Clara has freely reinterpreted them, which is, frankly, disrespectful and a kind of corruption. Thus, Giovanni Bruno’s “Circle of Evenings” is no longer even a prophecy but only a kind of blessing upon her Evening Circle church group. Sister Clara is thoughtful and caring, a deep believer utterly devoted to evangelism and the Brunist vision, and the sincerest person Darren has ever known, but she is also a stubborn pragmatist, a compromiser and a builder, her apocalyptic message watered down by personal beliefs in charity and brotherhood and the establishment of a new faith. He understands her motivations but finds something impure about them. Well, he is not himself a proselytizer. The truth is the truth. If only one person grasps it and is saved, that is enough. Brother Abner, contrarily, is more of a revolutionary, radically committed to the truth as it has been revealed to him, even if it is a terrible truth. Sins not expurgated by fire, he has preached, will be punished by fire in the life to come. If the Brunists are, as they call themselves, “the Army of the Sons of Light,” Abner Baxter is the Army, Clara the Light. Darren is afraid of Brother Abner and loves Sister Clara but knows in his heart he belongs in Abner’s Army.

Clara and Ben have also talked in a frank way on the tapes about First Follower Carl Dean Palmers, who turned up at the camp unexpectedly last Friday, calling himself Pach’, or Apache. A strange, beardy, tattooed fellow in a tattered ball cap and engraved red boots who keeps to himself but is not afraid of hard work and who may or may not still be a Brunist believer. Ben mostly argues for him, but Clara seems full of doubts. Because of her daughter probably. Pach’ seems to have his eye on Elaine, who is homely and spindly and a half foot taller than he is. Hard to figure, though he’s no beauty either. He has been a wild and disturbing presence for many, seen as an apostate and a dangerous interloper, an ex-con with criminal ways, but Darren and Billy Don have found him something of a godsend — Darren because he is potentially a fount of information about the earliest days, Billy Don simply because he has needed someone like him at the camp his own age to talk to. They have seen his dark side in the somewhat obscene photos taken on the Day of Redemption, but Darren argues that his frenzy was a kind of divine frenzy. A hero who took a lot of punishment for others. And his arrival proved a good omen. The very same day he entered the camp, they received the amazing news that they were suddenly the new possessors of the Mount of Redemption and other lands about, and many credited Pach’ with bringing them this miraculous good fortune by his return to the fold. He has been slow to open up and says he can’t remember what the Prophet actually said, but he has told them some very vivid prison stories and what it was like down at the city jail the night after the Day of Redemption, and Darren is eager to learn more.

When Billy Don attempts to explain the Marcella tapes to Sally Elliott over a cherry-chocolate sundae in the Tucker City drugstore (she’s buying as usual, knowing he’s penniless), he is a bit disturbed by how funny she thinks it all is, but he appreciates the relief from Darren’s fierce humorlessness, so he smiles his embarrassed smile and goes along. They are sitting at one of those old-fashioned wrought-iron marble-topped ice cream tables that he associates with the town he grew up in. He feels at home in here and is happy to be with this girl again. Sally wants to know how the voice ended up in the ditch, so he tells her the story of how the girl got left behind when the Brunists gathered on the Mount with box suppers the night before the Day of Redemption and how she came running out there all alone just at the same time that the Brunists’ worst enemies, the followers of Reverend Abner Baxter, came driving out there to attack them, and how the Brunists, seeing the lights on the mine road and hoping to avoid the confrontation, jumped into their cars and with their lights off went charging down the hill toward the Baxterites, hoping to get past them before they could get turned around, and how there was a terrible pile-up (Sally is laughing again, but this is serious) and the poor girl got struck by six or seven different cars and died there in the ditch.

“That’s terrible, Billy Don!” says Sally, still giggling. “And her voice just got stuck there and can’t get out?”

“No, it’s not like that. If she’s God’s messenger, she might be heard anywhere, any time, and even by different people in different places at the same time. But it was such a key moment. Reverend Baxter was converted and became a Brunist that night at the ditch, and there was a great reconciliation and they all marched together the next day to the Mount of Redemption, and that’s really how the church was born. Right after that came the Persecution and everyone got split up and wandered about. And that Saturday last week was exactly five years after the Night of the Sacrifice, and it was when Reverend Baxter and Mrs. Collins and all their followers finally came together again, right there beside that same ditch. It was just natural something unusual might happen.”

“That’s what it’s called? The sacrifice?” Sally plucks another cigarette from her pack, offers him one which he again turns down. “I only chew the stuff,” he said shyly the first time, then worried she might have found that too hicksville and laughed it off as a joke, or tried to. “You know,” she says, lighting up, “I remember my dad saying something at the time about her maybe being killed in a ritual sacrifice.”

“That’s an insane rumor. These are all just ordinary people like you and me. They don’t do stuff like that. Your dad must have got mixed up with the Powers of Darkness.”

He expects her to smile at that, but instead she turns melancholy. “You’re not far off. My dad’s in the dark all right, always has been. Less light in there than you can get out of a used sparkler. And mixed up? Absolutely. But power? He’s had the stupidest job in the world and he just got fired from it. Now he’s going to be filed away in some corner down at city hall. They’d make him the janitor, but he can’t stay on his feet long enough to push a broom.” She blows a long plume of smoke and watches it rise toward the tin ceiling of the old drugstore, then gets out her notebook and jots something down. He’d only meant to joke in his clumsy way, but he obviously touched a sore point, and he’s sorry. Sally doesn’t have all that much in the way of a bosom, just two soft bulges, but it’s hard not to stare because she always wears T-shirts with funny things printed on them. Today there’s a flying star and it says: IF YOU GET HIT BY A SHOOTING STAR, YOU’LL METEOR MAKER. That’s probably sacrilegious, but he likes it that she gives him things to read there so he doesn’t have to keep looking away. Maybe he should say he’d like to bookmark it and take it home with him. If he only had the nerve. As far as he can tell (she has a kind of shameless way of scratching herself), she doesn’t wear a bra either. “So, the poor girl. Just bad luck, hunh? Went for a jog, wrong place, wrong time?”

“Well, we don’t think it was just luck.”

“Oh right. God’s secret designs. Kill a kid to kickstart a new religion. And so now you guys are trying to crack God’s code. Don’t you ever wonder, Billy Don, why any god, if there were one, would want to play such silly games with people? If he wanted something, why wouldn’t he just come out with it?”

“He did that. It’s called the Bible. It’s up to us to read it and understand it and live by it.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the thing. Most of it. Skipped some of the dumber parts. If God wrote it, he’s a crummy writer. He didn’t, of course. A bunch of beardy guys with tight assholes did.”

He knows he’s gone red again. She’s trying to provoke him and he should probably get up and leave, but the sundae is like the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten and he can’t help but linger over it. The sort of thing he has had to do without while traveling unpaid with the Brunists. If he or Darren need money for anything — new jeans or a pair of shoes — they have to ask Clara for it; no way they could ever ask for ice cream money, though Sister Ludie Belle sometimes buys tubs of commercial ice cream for the Sunday camp meals. Sally, watching him, says, “Hey, Billy Don. Would you like another?” He stares down into his empty bowl. He wants to say no thank you, but Satan (maybe she really is the devil incarnate like Darren says) has him by the whats-its and he can’t.

And it’s not just the sundae. Sally mostly makes fun of him, he knows that, but he likes to be around her and he finds himself confessing things to her he’d never tell anyone else. All his doubts, for example. How he still prays every day but feels more and more like he’s just talking to himself, as if his involvement with the Brunists has cut him off from God and Jesus (“Well, there’s something to be said for them, then,” Sally said). How he wanted to get on that bus with the kids from Florida — they were a lot more fun than the crowd at the camp, and just as Christian — but how hard it would be to let down Darren and Sister Clara and Brother Ben. About how he woke up one night and Darren was touching him and how it scared him but he let it happen. In fact, maybe that was the scariest part. He didn’t know what else to do until it occurred to him he could just roll over. The next day Darren told him about a dream he’d had about a beautiful woman who turned into Mabel Hall when he touched her and he wondered if it was some kind of omen. Billy Don believed him and didn’t believe him at the same time. Mostly he didn’t believe him, and it made him wonder about the wet dreams he’d had recently, though he didn’t tell Sally that part.

And now these obsessions with words and numbers. When he told Sally about Darren’s code charts and “sacred calendars” at their first meeting here last week, Sally said, “Numbers always have these weird magical properties — but it depends on where you start counting from, right? To add a millennium, you first have to locate zero and one.” “I think we have worked all that out,” he said with a smile, and she smiled right back at him and said, “I think we have not,” and she told him about all the different calendars through history and how there have been thousands of prophets of apocalypse and all of them obviously wrong, the first being Jesus himself. “Well, Jesus was a special case,” he said, “because Jesus didn’t die. As for all the others, we can learn from them, and where they failed we can get it right.” But a seed of doubt had been planted and he knew she could hear it in his voice. When she shook her head sadly and said, “Oh, Billy Don,” he felt like he wanted to hug her and be hugged by her, and he worried then that he was succumbing to evil, and he wondered if he should just stand up and walk away as fast as he could.

It has been especially hard for him not to stand up for Darren. Becoming his friend was a turning point in Billy Don’s life. He was morally adrift until then, confused, more interested in baseball than religion and in the opposite sex more than either. He ended up in Bible college because it was cheap and said to be easy and full of friendly girls. And because he needed to get on the wagon and stay there. He and Darren met in a New Testament seminar taught by an old fellow with soft dewlaps and a soft brain who dug at his scalp while lecturing as if trying to dip his fingers in it, and they started meeting outside of class for coffee or lemonade and boiled peanuts. Darren introduced him to the scarier side of religion — what it was all about, really — and opened his eyes to the underlying patterns of things, which are not really hidden so much as just not visible on the surface. Billy Don was always good at puzzles — Darren said it was a gift from God and at the heart of his calling (he’d not even thought about having a calling) — and Darren proposed some new ones of a seriousness beyond anything he had imagined before. Darren was the smartest and most intense person he had ever met, and when Billy Don was around him, he felt connected to the world — not just the world, the universe—in a way he had never known. But now, well, he’s not so sure.

Today, when he brought up the Sibylline Oracles and how they prophesied the birth of Jesus, thinking to impress her, she only looked pained and told him they were a well-known sixth century fraud. Could this be true? “Such a desperate human thing,” she said, “to look for mysteries where there are none.” She often says things like that and it both thrills him and dismays him. That she treats him so seriously; that she mocks him so. But he likes to hear her laugh, so bold and free. He’s never heard a girl laugh quite like that, and he sometimes plays the fool for the simple reward of it. Now he has been telling her more of the Marcella legends, about the heart-shaped bloodstain on her tunic, about how when she died she pointed to Heaven and kept that pose all the next day (the belief of many being that she was raptured straight to Heaven), about the white bird that flew overhead and some said right out of her mouth, and the crosses of blood that appeared on people’s foreheads after. “Raptured? But there was a body. What happened to it?”

“No one knows.”

“Well, it all sounds like a lotta phony baloney to me,” she says, shaking her head and lighting up again.

“Yeah, that’s sorta what Pach’ said, too.”

“Patch?”

“Carl Dean Palmers. He’s one of the original twelve First Followers. He just turned up over the weekend. Drove in in an old beat-up van.”

“Oh, right. Ugly Palmers. What we called him in high school. Poor boy, he was. A knobby-headed toad with acne all the way to his knees and a raging temper. How does he look now?”

“Okay. He’s got a beard. Seems cool.”

“I thought he ended up in the penitentiary.”

“He did. He’s out now He picked up his new name in prison. When we filled him in about Marcella, he said he was there that night, and all that was, well, he used a bad word, but, like you said, baloney.”

Sally leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, “What was the bad word, Billy D?” There’s an embarrassed pause and he knows he has an idiotic grin on his face. “Bullshit…?” He nods. “So,” she exclaims, leaning back, “Ugly Palmers said it was all bullshit. Good for him!” She raises her empty sundae bowl as if in a toast. “Bullshit!”

“Well, maybe,” he says, trying not to look at the guy behind the soda fountain, “except for the part about her pointing to Heaven. You can see that even in the news photos.”

“Hmm. You’re right. I do remember something like that. Her arm sticking up like a petrified blue twig. I was so grossed out I could hardly register the details. At the time, I figured it must have been some kind of trick, but, really, I didn’t want to look. I was pretty squeamish back then.”

“There’s a famous painting of her in a church in Florida, lying in the ditch, pointing to Heaven like that.”

“With a blue arm?”

“No, she’s very—”

“What’s it based on? The painter’s fancy, I suppose, like all the hokum Jesus paintings. I bet no one even took a photograph while she was in the ditch.”

“Well, no…not in the ditch exactly…” Perhaps the whole conversation this afternoon has been aimed at this moment. There is something more he has wanted to share with Sally and he hasn’t known how to bring it up, and now here it is. It’s as if she knew just the question to ask. He reaches into his book bag and brings out the photos. He’s brought two of them — before and after shots, so to speak. “These were taken just before she died. In the first one there, you can see her hand is pointing up just like—”

“Hey! Look at the gorgeous ass on that stud!” She runs her finger over it, grinning broadly. This might not have been the best idea. People’s heads are turning. “Who is that? Oh right! I know! The newspaper guy. Miller. I heard my dad talking about these photos back at the time. And that’s her, hunh? The voice in the ditch. Poor thing. She’s cute. Except in this other one she looks absolutely terrified. She’s clutching that choker around her neck like the guy’s about to strangle her. Or maybe he’s going to beat her with that newspaper. Do you suppose these photos have anything to do with her being out there on the mine road that night?” She thinks about that for a moment. “Sure they do.”

“That might be a kind of simple way of looking at it,” he says softly, recalling Darren’s words. “God is not a ladies’ romance novelist.”

“No, you’re right there. He works more in the horror genre. Do you love God, Billy Don?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“If I thought he was really there, I’d hate him.”

“Wow. Just like Darren says. You really are evil.”

Sally grins and winks at him, stubbing out her cigarette, and he doesn’t know if it’s the wink of the devil or just a mischievous girl trying to be funny. “I wonder who took these photos. Do you suppose the jerk set up a camera at his back and took them himself?”

“Maybe. But we think it could be some sort of mysterious…you know…”

“God as a pornographer? Funny. I wouldn’t be surprised. But tell me, Billy Don,” she says, leaning across the table again in her bright orange T-shirt with the soft things floating in it and lowering her voice at last, “do these photos turn you on?”

“Well, sure. A little.” He knows he’s red to the roots (what a question!), but the conversation has come around to where in his fanta sies he’s always imagined it would, and he can tell she’s pretty excited herself. He’d like to ask her how she feels about them, but he doesn’t know how. He can only grin stupidly and read her shirt again.

“What does your friend think of them?”

“Darren? He says he feels as if he is staring upon the face of evil.”

The expression on Sally’s face is hard to read at first. It’s like amazement, disbelief, expectation — but then she bursts into a whooping peal of laughter, nearly falls off her chair. Everybody in the drugstore is staring at them now and he knows he should hide the photos, but he can’t move. “The face of evil!” she cries. “That’s beautiful!”

“I think he meant, you know, the cruelty and—”

“He’s not talking about the girl, I assume,” she gasps, in and around her laughter.

“No—”

“What other face is there, Billy Don?”

When he stares blankly at her, she points to it. Oh. That’s really embarrassing. It is funny, though, and he finds himself giggling in a hiccuppy sort of way. The guy behind the soda fountain is craning his neck to try to see the photos. Hastily, he slips them back into his book bag.

“Listen, Billy D,” Sally says. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Hey, listen to this one!” the Elliott girl calls out from behind an overgrown chokeberry thicket, putting Darren’s teeth on edge, her very presence a desecration here. “‘Buck Noone: Coalminer. Gone Below to Work One Last Shift.’”

“That’s great,” says Billy Don, grinning his clownish mustachioed grin. “But come here. Something really weird.” The girl has twisted wildflowers into her snarly hair and is wearing an orange T-shirt with what looks like the Star of Bethlehem on it (black on orange, the devil’s colors) and a two-edged slogan that could mean the birth of Christ connects you to God, but probably means that Christianity is lethal. “This headstone broke in half. See what it says.”

“‘A Broken Heart Lies Here.’ Wow! That one wins the black ribbon! Except…” She kicks at a whiskey bottle and a couple of crushed beercans in the weeds nearby. “Probably not God’s joke, but some drunk’s. Party place.”

The two of them are so engaged in their ghoulish amusements that they have forgotten the reason they are here. No matter. They will not find what they are looking for. Even did it exist, it would not appear before their blinded eyes. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.

Darren does not feel he has come here of his own accord. He has been brought here, whether by some demonic force or by the will of God, he cannot be sure, but mindful of the messages he has been discovering of late, he too, though uninterested in the pointless search of his two companions, has looked and listened carefully, read the stony messages, watched for suggestive patterns in the arrangement of the tombs, especially here in this old municipal cemetery from early in the century, when the town was young. It was not far from the center when first laid out, but the town, instead of embracing it, grew the other way, almost as if in fear or revulsion, and over time other cemeteries of a more contemporary and sterile sort (they have visited them) were created while this one sank into its woodsy surroundings and was largely forgotten, its graves untended. “You Will Be In Our Hearts Forever,” says a particularly melancholy gravestone lying in cracked ruin on its back, buried in weeds and dark green with moss, the deceased’s name obliterated by the weather or else broken away. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher. Who did not know Jesus.

When Darren discovered both the photos and the car gone, he was seized by a convulsive rage, which may have been a holy rage, though it didn’t feel like it. He felt personally betrayed and his eyes filled with tears. If Billy Don has shown that evil girl those photos, what else has he shown and told her? He had been working on his investigations into what he was calling “paranormal manifestations at the site of the first martyrdom” and additional esoteric implications in the patterns of text and number in other recordings and documents, such as “The Revelation to Reverend Ely Collins,” and in his careful cut-and-splice isolation of the fragments from the ditch he had struck on something new and startling: the word “two” before “week” (so perhaps it was “weeks”). Did that mean the voice was suggesting that the critical date might not be June the seventh, but July the twenty-sixth? He had dashed out in search of Billy Don to get his opinion and out in the main square had run into Mrs. Blaurock, who told him she’d just spoken with Billy Don on his way over to the parking lot. She’d grabbed his arm in her big meaty fist and said, “There’s a lotta people here think you boys’re on to something. God bless you, son. You keep doing your good work.” Their car was gone. He’d feared the worst. The missing photos had confirmed it.

It was all he could do to stop himself from exploding into a tantrum when a giddy, excited Billy Don returned to tell him the Elliott girl would be taking them on a tour of the town cemeteries in search of Marcella Bruno’s grave. When he confronted Billy Don with his treacherous deception (his voice was trembling, he couldn’t help it), Billy Don only blushed and grinned sheepishly and asked if he was going with them or not? No, he snapped. Certainly not. It was completely stupid — even if they found a grave marker with her name on it, they could not know whose the buried body was, or even if there was one — and it could be dangerous. He begged Billy Don not to go, but when Billy Don left, he left with him, in part to protect his deluded friend but mostly because he could not seem to stop himself.

They started in what the other two believed was the most likely place, the San Luca Catholic cemetery, and they did find the parents’ grave with its small “Riposa In Pace” headstone, together with three other Bruno children buried close by — two boys just out of their teens and an unborn baby girl — but no sign of Giovanni or Marcella. Of course, they were probably excommunicated by then and not allowed in here. That was the girl’s judgment, but just the same, they scoured the cemetery grave by grave, Billy Don squatting down to read the names and numbers, the Elliott girl sometimes taking notes. The place felt alien to Darren, full of open-armed Virgin Marys and tearful angels, and he did not believe he would learn anything here, so he trailed along behind the others, keeping a wary eye on the irreverent girl and on the other visitors wandering about, mostly old women wearing headscarves. In case anyone asked, they were presumably college friends of hers, working on a history project, but if they were found out, the consequences could be serious.

He did pause for a moment in front of a square blocky tombstone for two brothers who died apparently at the same time in 1931, an accident or something. There were two carved miners’ helmets on top and a strange Italian inscription that read “Quello Che Siete Fummo, Quello Che Siamo Sarete.” “Siete” might be “seven” and “fummo” “smoke,” he thought, but he had no clue at all about “sarete” or “siamo.” The helmets had lamps on them, just like the one Clara often uses for baptism ceremonies, and the four numbers of the year, he realized, added up to fourteen, twice “siete.” Could “sarete” be some kind of tunic or something? The Elliott girl saw him studying it and came over to read the inscription over his shoulder, blowing her obnoxious “fummo” past his ear. “What’s a ‘sarete’?” he asked. Barked, really. He was finding it hard to be civil. “Well, my Italian is pretty lousy, but I think it’s all a play on the ‘to be’ verb. Something like, ‘What you are we were and what we are you’ll be.’ Couple of guys who wanted everyone to know we’re all in the same club.” He felt stupid and angry. He began walking toward the gate and eventually they followed, laughing at some private joke.

They went on to the Woodlawn, Our Savior, South Baptist Memorial (in which they recognized the names of several of the coal miners killed in the Deepwater accident, including Ben Wosznik’s brother), and West Condon Municipal cemeteries, all out beyond the edge of town on one side or the other. In one of them the Elliott girl asked them about her aunt Debra. Had Darren any intention of replying to the girl’s question (he had not), he would have said that she is a committed leader within the movement and one of its most selfless benefactors (this was mostly true), serenely (less true) awaiting God’s next interaction with human history. He might also have told her that it was Colin, in a clearly visionary moment, who had recognized her as an emissary of the forces of evil — he mistakenly called her the Antichrist, though everyone knew what he meant — at the time of her brazen infiltration of the gathering last week on the Mount of Redemption. Colin, though desperately unstable, is a special sort of genius, attuned to vibrations beyond the ken of others in the way that certain high-pitched frequencies could be heard by dogs but not by the human ear, and Darren always listens carefully to everything he says. Billy Don did answer the girl and what he said was that Mrs. Edwards is “kind of upset” about all the new people in the camp and about having to give up her cabin and that she spends most of her time now down in the vegetable garden with Colin and Mrs. Dunlevy.

Here in the old city cemetery, where there does indeed appear to be a patch of graves marked only by rotting wooden crosses with obscure markings on them, the kind of place unwanted bodies might once have been dumped, Darren has found many small signs of possible relevance: several gravestones with encircled hands pointing to Heaven on them; somber quotations from the Book of Revelation; a flying bird, probably a dove, also in a circle on the tombstone of a woman named White; a carved bleeding heart on a broken stone obelisk (“The face of evil!” the wicked girl exclaimed, pointing at the heart, and for some inane reason the two of them fell all over themselves in hysterical giggling); several number combinations of seven and fourteen; and a dizzying quantity of letters, words and names lying about like the answers to a lost crossword puzzle. He feels he is drawing close to something but has not yet found it.

It was not easy getting in here. The Elliott girl knew where it was, but even so, it was hard to find, the paths overgrown, the cemetery itself hidden behind trees, brush, and bramble. She said there was an easier way in, but it was more public, the graveyard being only a hundred yards or so from one of the country club golf course fairways, and indeed they have come across a few gashed golfballs. It was while crawling through the thickest part on the way in, blackberry bushes snagging at his chinos, the sky overhead darkening, broodingly overcast, that Darren suddenly knew that he’d come to the place to which he’d been so mysteriously drawn, and he began to forgive the girl in the way that one feels inclined to forgive the Antichrist for doing what he has to do to bring on the Last Days. Until she said, “It’s been a long afternoon, guys. Time for a pee. Ladies this way, gents that.” Billy Don happily stepped behind a tree and relieved himself noisily into the dead leaves, but Darren left them in disgust and pushed on into the old graveyard on his own.

Billy Don now comes on a rectangular hole in the ground and he and the girl both assume it is an open grave, one that was either robbed or never filled. “Spooky!” Billy Don says, and in truth there is something unsettling about it, but Darren knows it is not what he is looking for, or what is looking for him. More like a kind of prefatory signal. It occurs to him that God’s purpose in taking or hiding Marcella’s body was to stimulate the very search he is undertaking, and that this insight itself is a kind of preparation. “Do you think it might have been hers?” Billy Don asks with a hushed voice.

“Just as likely it was dug by drunken kids on a graveyard dare,” the girl says dismissively, but she seems nervous, too, and lights up another cigarette. “You know, who can spend the night sleeping in an open grave? It’s so overgrown, I think this one must have been dug or disturbed a long time ago.”

“Well, five years is a pretty long time…”

While the other two poke around in the hole like the disrespectful predators that they are, Darren moves among the gray stones as through a book with scattered half-erased pages, searching out the graveyard’s hidden corners. The earth is soft underfoot, rising and dipping slightly (there is probably a webwork of old abandoned mines below and one day all of this could be completely swallowed up), the tombstones tipping and leaning in odd directions, many of them broken or fallen. The roots of maturing trees have reached into the graves themselves and upended their markers and no doubt stirred their bones. Darren is not disheartened by these reminders of time’s ravages and the brevity of the human span. On the contrary, he finds the place unspeakably beautiful in its humble abandon and knows that God would find it so too, loving its buried denizens in a way not possible in those manicured grassy fields of grand self-congratulating monuments. He is happy he has come here.

And then, suddenly, there it is. Behind several small half-sunken footstones set in a kind of semicircle like boundary markers (like footlights, he is thinking, at the edge of a stage): a lone grave with a tilting stone and the name Gabriel J. Brown. Gabriel: the Annunciation angel. J. Brown: Giovanni Bruno. Died: age 33. Christ’s age. The Prophet’s own age on the Day of Redemption, and maybe the year he was killed, too. On the stone: the Brunist symbol of a cross in a circle. And an ominous warning: “Awake! Believe! Repent! Thy bones as mine are only lent!” He realizes the other two have gathered behind him. “Look at the date,” he says. He is calm now, free from fear or loathing.

“That was a long time ago.”

“No, Billy Don. I mean the day.” There is a distant rumble of ominous thunder.

“Six, seven. Ah. Wow. June the seventh.”

He feels the devilish girl shrink away. Was that a hissing sound?

II.4 Friday 1 May

I don’t feel like I’ve come to the right place. How did you end up here?

“I don’t know. It just seemed to happen.” They are passing down West Condon’s dark dripping Main Street with its facing rows of squat one- and two-story brick buildings staring sullenly at one another across a patched and repatched blacktopped street as if in chagrin or regret. Some are boarded up, others gaudily SALE-signed, the signs tattered with age. The rain has let up and there are breaks in the clouds, but there are still distant rumbles. It is Friday, a shopping day, and May Day on top of it, and there may be action out at the highway shopping centers, but nothing is happening here. The streets are empty but for a scatter of old rusted-out clunkers and muddy pickups looking as though they simply broke down where parked a decade or so ago, and were left to sit as monuments to ruin. The only shop doing any apparent business is a package liquor store down a side street. “A challenging ministry.”

You can say that again. This place exudes sin like sweat. Those wet bricks stink with it, the gutters are running with it. Smell it? Like old socks. A seed of evildoers. These poor lost devils were shapen in iniquity, as the saying goes, and in sin did their mothers conceive them. What in my name are we doing out here?

A shoe store clerk steps out for a curbside smoke as they pass by. They exchange nods. He looks down at Wesley’s shoes. “I was tired of being kept like a pet in a windowless cage,” Wesley says. “I wanted to see daylight.”

“I know what you mean,” the shoe store clerk agrees gloomily, flicking his butt into the wet street, and Jesus says: I am the light of the world, son. What more do you need? “If you want to trade those old dogs in for some genuine vintage classics, come on in. I got a sale on. Whole damned store.”

“Another time, thanks. Fresh air. I need fresh air.”

“Suit yourself,” says the shoe store clerk. Jesus says nothing, but Wesley feels a little tremor in his solar plexus or thereabouts, as though Jesus might just have shrugged.

Prissy seemed unusually excited and distracted this morning, and when she dashed off to do her shopping, she left the side door leading to the kitchen open, so he and his indwelling Christ just walked out. There was something very strange at first about the streets. As if they were not quite real. Eerie. It was raining lightly, but it was not the rain. Then it occurred to him. It was the daylight. The garage dance studio has only one window at the back, painted black, so there is not much difference in there between night and day, and he has somewhat lost his notion of diurnal time. Prissy sometimes brings him supper when he’s expecting breakfast. Also there are no mirrors out on the streets, at least not in the residential neighborhood, the shop windows that remain here on Main Street having dimly restored the studio’s ambience of replicative enclosure.

The Chamber of Commerce office looks closed, last autumn’s high school football schedule still pasted up on its fly-specked window. A furniture and appliances store is offering its stock for rental as well as sale. Next to it, a bald-headed barber wearing a stained butcher’s apron sits in his own chair, thumbing through a tattered magazine. He glances up at Wesley, raises his eyebrows in inquiry, shakes his head, returns to his magazine. Prissy cuts his hair now, shaping it, as she says, to suit his new image as a prophet. It is longer, he has sideburns now, and he has not shaved for a few days.

There is a bus pulled in at the corner station, which doubles as a juvenile hangout with its soda fountain and pinball machines. No one is getting on or off the bus, which is headed west according to the destination announced at the top of the front window. He has not told Jesus where he is going. There are no secrets between them, so he has also not told himself. But now the cat is out of the bag. He is going to the bank to get some money to buy a bus ticket. He can feel Jesus’ sour complaints more than hear them. “You have told me to remember the old rule of the prophet,” he says. “And you just said this place is so full of sin it smells like dirty socks.” A bald guy in a bowtie leaving the bank — a member of his former congregation, best he can recall — seems about to object to that, then changes his mind, dances out of his way.

Well, I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, and this is a good place for that.

“There are sinners everywhere,” he reminds Jesus, pushing on into the bank. “If we stay here, we’re just going to get into trouble. Wouldn’t you like to hit the open road?”

Nah. I like it here, Christ says. There are three women in the bank behind the counters. Knowing Christ’s preferences, he goes to the prettiest one. I think I’m in love.

“In love—?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” the girl says, attempting a friendly smile, but flushing visibly as if he’s found her out. Well, he’s a prophet now. He probably has.

“Pardon is granted, my child.” He returns her smile and hands her his checkbook. “I would like to make a withdrawal, please.” She takes his checkbook with trembling hands and goes to check the account. Jesus says: It was her “Dance of the Seven Veils” that really got to me. She said it was a kind of requiem for my poor cousin, and I was deeply moved. “Perhaps we can take her with us,” Wesley suggests, gazing at the young woman who has returned. She glances anxiously at the other women, who watch him now with big round eyes. Ah. Yes. There’s an idea. “How much is there, my dear? I think I’d like to take it all.”

“There’s…there’s nothing in your account, Reverend Edwards. The account is closed.”

“Closed? Closed?” he roars, and the women all jump an inch or so off the floor. The young woman serving them crosses herself, and, inside, Jesus winces. It might be a good idea to ask who has done this, he says. “You let me handle this!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Who has done this? Who has closed my account?”

“I–I don’t know, sir.”

“Where is the thieving iniquitous money changer who runs this unholy establishment?”

“Who? You mean Mr. Cavanaugh? He’s not here today, Reverend Edwards! I’ll call the, uh, the assistant manager upstairs!”

Look, you’ve frightened her. It might be wise…

“No need to be frightened, my child. This is a mere business matter. Ha ha. Your soul is not in danger.” He has meant that as a mere lighthearted jest, but she looks more terrified than ever.

“Charlie?” she is whispering loudly into the phone. “It’s Angie. Come quickly!”

“Is Charlie the assistant manager?”

“Yes, sir, he’ll — he’ll be down in a minute.”

I just have this uneasy feeling we should be leaving. Well is he, you know, that hath found prudence, et cetera. “Perhaps, miss, we’ll come back another day.”

Priscilla Parsons Tindle, returning from her highway shopping with a carload of flowers, decides to stop at the bank on her way through downtown to reprovision her depleted purse. She has amazing news for Wesley and she has decided to reveal it to him without words by way of a special May Day dance on a vast bed of flowers. Her May basket. She has chosen blooms with big velvety petals, which she plans to pluck and heap up in a great pile on the studio floor as a kind of aromatic nest, first dancing a vigorous bounding grand allegro dance of the joys of spring all around the studio to work up a good sticky perspiration, then plunging into the petals for the celebrative part of the dance, during which, now clothed only in sweet petals as if in full flower herself, she will, in effect, with movements she has been mentally choreographing on her drive, prophesy the extraordinary events of a few months hence. He may misunderstand her meaning and try to join her in the nest, but that’s all right too.

She parks in front of Mrs. Catter’s beauty salon and walks back toward the bank, just as two policemen come jogging across the street, their hands at their holsters, and with a great banging of doors and loud shouts enter into it. She decides perhaps it is not the right moment and returns hastily to her car.

I recognize the big one. The Roman legionnaire who speared me when I was nailed up and already dead and couldn’t defend myself.

“He was a gum-chewer?”

No, but he worked his jaws in ominous ways. We can’t let them get away with this. Do something.

The legionnaire has tipped his police cap low over his brows and is cracking his knuckles restlessly as though itching to inflict grievous bodily harm. The police station — counter, chairs, telephones, clock on the wall, notices pinned up — is much like the bank, but darker and dirtier and without any pretty girls. Would his money be safer here? It would not.

Oh oh. Get ready. I think we’re in for a scourging. That guy coming looks exactly like Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate introduces himself as Police Chief Romano. Romano! What did I tell you!

Police Chief Romano asks why Reverend Edwards has been arrested, and the legionnaire snaps back in his hard blunt gum-popping way: “Public nuisance.”

“What was he doing?”

“Scaring the pants off them girls in the bank,” says the legionnaire’s partner, releasing a gob of brown spit into a paper cup.

“Nonsense. I was merely checking my bank account. It seems I have been robbed.”

“Robbed?”

“That’s right, Officer. My personal account has been emptied out and closed.”

“Was this an individual account or a joint account?”

“That hardly matters. It has been done without my knowledge or permission. The bank owes me an explanation, not to mention the missing money.”

“Unh hunh.” Police Chief Romano, who looks like a man who has seen everything, closes his ledger and pulls on his nose and says, “Let him go, boys.” The legionnaire protests at that, smacking his fist in his palm, but the police chief says, “He’s harmless, Charlie. Only a bit batty. It’s his old lady has cleaned him out. Her and them people out at the church camp. You might say he’s got a point.”

While driving home, Priscilla has been rehearsing her “push-push” sequence for the nest of flowers dance, hammering the steering wheel with her pelvis, and she realizes that the climax of her May Day performance will be quite exciting and almost certainly misunderstood by dear Wesley. And by Jesus, too, probably, whom (if that is not stretching a pronoun), in some odd way, she has also come to love, though she believes he will be quicker to grasp the portent of her dance and be more approving of it. His story really. But now what to do with the flowers? They might wilt in the car or in the house or studio, and moreover she wants to surprise Wesley tonight and really does not want to have to deal with Ralph’s tedious questions or even more tedious silence. She decides the best place for them is in the open air in the shade at the back of the studio under the blacked-out window, and all the better if it rains on them a bit, so she quickly improvises a little number she calls her “bundles of joy” dance, sweeping the precious blooms from the car to what she calls “backstage” in a series of little twirls and leaps that the neighbors will probably think of as quite loopy, though surely they are used to it by now.

This is, was for years, has become again of late, Priscilla’s way. Life as dance else not life at all. It is her own special vision, her way of creating the beauty that life, left to do its own thing, so sadly lacks. In her professional years with Ralph, she preferred austere staging, harsh lighting, African percussion and Eastern wood and string instruments, and a minimum of costuming, finding even a body stocking too constrictive. Ralph was an elegant partner, always there, supportive, given to understatement, which set off her own passionate exuberance, but somewhat passive, waiting always for her to take the lead. Their dances seemed often to end without resolution, more like questions, really. He did not understand climax; he was incapable of it. He was something like a self-contained tango partner, formal (he even dressed in black with a pleated white shirt; only in the studio would he wear less), taut with an inner tension, but ultimately predictable. Priscilla had always aimed at the unexpected, for life, she felt, was all too predictable, and it needed something out of the ordinary for it to be experienced at all. It was, in effect, her way of praying to what she preferred to call the Life Force rather than God, though she was a believing Christian like most people were, simply too preoccupied or unsuited to figure things out on her own and trusting the wisdom of those whose vocation it was — Wesley, for example, various astrologers and philosophers, her great-aunt when she was still alive — and Priscilla addressed the Life Force wherever and whenever she could. She had dishwashing dances and laundry and ironing dances and shopping for Ralph’s high-fiber breakfast cereals dances. Sometimes these were just spontaneous responses to the moment, a flash of sudden inspiration in a department store aisle or on a putting green, but she tried always to choreograph her dances, in retrospect when not possible before, choreography being her way of thinking about the world. Giving it, it being shapeless, shape. Being nameless, name.

Over time, however, trapped in this small town by the curse of a small family property inheritance and limited income, her vision slipped away from her, and the mundane became the mundane once more, her only dance the spiritless dance of the sorrowful housewife. The studio became a place to give classes to children, and her exercises, which she kept up without knowing were mainly a way to keep her weight down. She felt like such a fraud. She and Ralph became active at the church as a way, in her case at least, to keep a faint spark alive, her husband taking over Sunday School and the choir, she becoming the church organist and organizer of holiday pageants. And so the years went by. She and Ralph no longer danced together, though sometimes they gave little concerts, at the church mostly, Ralph singing, she accompanying him on the piano. She found herself increasingly focused on the mortal condition: If there was no further reason to dance, what was left except waiting for death? She would have created a dance to explore this question, but she was no longer creating dances.

And then there was Wesley. The great-souled one. What happened in his office that first time did not feel like a dance, it felt more like getting run over by a train. But that was because she had pretty much stopped dancing and had forgotten what it felt like. Of course it was a dance. It was the dance. Whereupon she returned with all her heart and mind to her abandoned art of choreography. The magic was back and she was alive again. Really alive. How could she not love this man?

Dropping the last load of flowers behind the studio, she sees that the light is on inside: the black paint has been scratched away in a tiny place at the lower right of the window pane and a spark of light is showing through. A kind of peephole, she thinks, and in the mud at her feet, though partly scuffed away: footprints other than her own. Ah. They have been watched. Well, she is used to being watched, if not exactly in this way. Just so he doesn’t bring the neighbors. She leans forward to see what Ralph might have seen, and there is the pair of joined exercise mats in the center of the room, so often the site of their terpsichorean ecstasies, the various lamps with their colored gels set strategically about to provide maximum visual effects in the facing and overhead mirrors, the translucent silk cloths she used in her “Dance of the Seven Veils” draped over the barre, and the feathered headdress she has donned to play the eagle to his pinioned Prometheus, though they chose a different renewable organ than the liver for her to eat, and as she is studying the scene, it occurs to her that something is missing: Wesley.

You could at least have kicked his shins on the way out, Jesus says irritably. He is still in a rage about the legionnaire and Wesley’s unwillingness to exact some token of revenge. They are sitting on a stool in Mick’s Bar & Grill, Jesus having made a remark about having to feed the inner man when they passed it — I’d also be up for a quick snort, he added — communing over a beer and a grilled hamburger so overcooked it has an ashy taste even under a thick lathering of ketchup and yellow mustard. I’ve taken up residence in the wrong person again after all: a wimp and a fence-sitter.

“I would not object if you chose to reside elsewhere,” Wesley replies.

“That seems to be the general opinion around here.” This is the former Chamber of Commerce executive director Jim Elliott, sitting alone on the corner stool, his voice slurred with drink. Gin on ice with a twist of lemon. He’s had three of them since they came in and was clearly well under way before that. Elliott is a Presbyterian and a Rotarian and a golfer of sorts. Wesley has suffered him on many occasions, and this is another. Because they have both been bullied by the same man, Elliott has assumed an affinity between them that does not exist, and has been unloading all his woes, everything from the general lack of recognition and gratitude for his selfless service to the city of West Condon to his deteriorating golf game, the termites in his basement, his irresponsible daughter, the sickening noise at the back end of his car, and his lack of a satisfactory amorous life, for which he uses a less delicate phrase, spicing his lamentations with groans and fist-bangs and curses. “Judas effing Priest!” he exclaims now, slapping the bar, and Wesley feels a sharp cringing deep in the gut as if his indwelling Christ, personally offended, has shrunk away. Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools, Jesus grumbles sourly, and Wesley asks the establishment’s proprietor if he has any antacids. He has not.

“I know what you mean,” Elliott says, apropos of nothing whatsoever. He raises his glass to Wesley in a toast, or perhaps to the villain behind the bar responsible for this travesty of a sandwich — the wretch’s eyes are not focusing clearly. “Bottoms!” he exclaims, and tossing his head back, drains his drink, then slams the glass back on the bar, concluding with what is partly an “Up!” and partly a deep belch, a little act he probably practices. “Pour me another one, Mick! Gosh darn it!”

Mr. DeMars, who has been enjoying a sip or two himself — in memory of his dear old Irish mother, as he put it in his squeaky voice, though it turns out the lady is still alive, only somewhat non compos mentis due to a life of heavy drinking — does so, and with an apologetic glance and shrug in Wesley’s direction, pours himself another while he’s at it. Right, go with the flow. Wesley orders up another beer. Since he’s sharing it, it’s only half a beer, after all, and he needs it to keep the charred hamburger from getting stuck in his throat. Christ Jesus concurs. Thou hast put gladness in my heart, he says, adding a reminder that the Son of Man came eating and drinking, as it says in the gospel, and needs must continue upon his holy path. To every one, as they say, a loaf of bread, and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine! Which calls to mind our own dear piece of flesh, Jesus adds postscripturally. I find I miss her.

“Yes, but she’s very demanding.”

“You can say that again! A real pain in the neck!” exclaims Elliott with crossed eyes. “Who’re we talking about?”

“We must be talking about my mother again,” says the big proprietor in his wee little voice.

“I feel freer out here.”

Freer? Are you kidding? You nearly got us locked up!

“Me too, goddamn it! Let’s drink to that! Feeling freer, whoever the heck she is!”

“Who you are in that airless box is who she says you are.”

She has her little fantasies, Jesus says. But what a sweet tight little ass she’s got.

“Ass? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Did I say ‘ass’? I meant to say ‘neck.’”

I’m Jesus Christ, I can say what I want to say.

“But whatever I said, to heck with it! I meant it, and if you’ll tell me what it was I’ll say it again!” Whereupon Elliott snorts like a horse and lights up a cigarette with a musical lighter.

Wait a minute. That wasn’t me who said that. There’s somebody else in here.

“What—!”

“What?”

That’s right. Move over, sucker.

Omigod! It’s Satan!

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes!” says Elliott, rolling his eyes stupidly.

Get thee behind me, Satan, but no funny business back there!

“This is terrible! What’s he doing in there?”

“In where?” Elliott asks, looking around in confused alarm.

No. Just kidding. It’s really me.

“Damn you! Don’t do that!”

“Hey!” cries Elliott, bristling and falling off his stool. He clutches the bar with both hands. “Don’t do what? Why do I get the feeling that I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about?”

“I think he’s talking to himself,” the proprietor says.

“Oh.” Elliott, with some difficulty, sits back down. He picks up his drink again, brings it and his cigarette to his mouth at the same time. “That’s all right, then.”

“Sorry,” Wesley says. “It’s a kind of…indigestion. Too much white bread.”

“That’ll do it.”

“‘I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’ Something Paul said. I think he ate too much white bread, too.”

“No shoot. That’s really interesting. Paul, hunh? But I’m lost. Another round, Mick. And get another beer for the preacher and whoever.”

“I know when I’ve got a good thing” is the subtext of one of Priscilla’s repertoire numbers. It is one of her simplest routines. She could call it her “sex slave” dance, but she does not wish to demean in any way the grandeur and nobility of the relationship it celebrates. The name that Wesley knows it by is the “Glory Dance.” He need only say the word. She adores this beautiful crazy virile man and is willing to do anything for him, and this dance expresses that. She knows she must work really hard to keep him here and keep him safe, which is not easy. Only she understands his special genius. Only she is capable of it. The others laugh at him or are afraid of him and they will try to lock him away and do dreadful things to him if she is not vigilant. Protecting this great-souled one is now her life’s work, though she is fully aware it will bring her hardships and humiliation. As now. These men are laughing at her, she knows. But people have laughed at her before. She holds her head high. She is doing her dance of quiet pride. Her whole body is in motion, but they cannot see that.

When she saw the police enter the First National Bank, she should never have fled. She could not have known that Wesley was in there; she was only frightened of the policemen, those ominous authority figures who have been turning up in her nightmares. But why are they in her dreams? Because of her fears for Wesley. And so, in a sense, she did know he was in there. It was her dream happening in real life. When she arrived after racing back from the empty studio, the women clerks were still in a tizzy about “the crazy man.” She didn’t need to ask any questions, she merely did her making-a-cash-withdrawal dance, one she has rehearsed all too often, and listened to their chatter and that of the other women who had entered. He was shouting lunatic things about love and Jesus and calling the bank president vile names, they said. He wanted to abduct Angela. The cute one, who acknowledges this with her hand on her breast. We’ll take her with us, he said. We? There were others? Probably outside in a getaway car. The women were waiting for him to draw a gun and try to rob the bank. There were no men in the bank now, so one of them admitted to having soiled her panties. Just a speck. It was so terrifying! But what happened to him? Angie’s brother came running over and arrested him. The crazy man called the officers agents of evil, or something like that. Charlie looks so handsome in his new police uniform.

So she came here to the police station, fearing the worst. She knew she might never see him again. She was close to tears. Could she somehow choreograph a jailbreak dance? But they have released him. He is not here. It’s a miracle. She feels a great wash of relief that makes her tremble, even though she is trying to appear calm and collected, like some sort of nurse or sister. She is surrounded by uniformed men who see her, she knows, as a ridiculous and wanton woman. In her worry and fear, she has been too transparent. But she can’t help it.

“Where did he go?” she asks at last, her voice cracking.

They don’t know. The burly one with the toothpick in his teeth has a vulgar little routine of his own, danced to the rhythm of his snapping fingers and popping knuckles with singular leering intent. He is standing between her and the door. She is already rehearsing in her mind her exit-stage-right dance. A casual farewell pirouette so she doesn’t get her backside pinched. The older one who is chewing tobacco spits into the corner and says, “Not much open on the street. You might try Mick’s. He was headed that general direction.”

On his way to his unannounced destination (though Jesus has divined it: This is crazy! They’ll be waiting for you!), Wesley has stopped to speak with his erstwhile friend and colleague, the Lutheran pastor Konrad Dreyer, whom he found tossing a ball around with his young boys in the churchyard during a sunny break in the weather. He wants Connie to call the Ministerial Association together to protest his unwarranted dismissal in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and Connie has said he would do that, though it also has its hazards because of sectarian differences, especially since Wes is claiming some sort of direct mystical connection to the Redeemer.

“It is not mystical.”

He is in his old neighborhood, though he never thought of it as a neighborhood, more like some kind of accident that just happened, he but a passing witness. He had always known that his mission in life, as his mother had often reminded him, transcended neighborhoods, transcended towns, really, even nations, though sometimes it was hard to remember that during board wranglings or disorderly teenage Sunday School classes or rodent problems in the church basement. There are a lot of churches in this neighborhood, as there are in all others, here mostly made of stone or brick in accordance with the construction principles of the third little piggy. Trinity Lutheran is a limestone church with a heavy Teutonic entranceway, probably built about the same time as the lodge out at the church camp. Dark and damp inside, as he recalls, but pleasingly resonant for a preacher’s voice.

“Paul said, Christ lives in me. Does he live in you, Connie?”

Connie meditates on that. He lights up a pipe, so Wesley does likewise despite Jesus’ complaints that he is being asphyxiated. “Well, sure, Wes, in the sense that we all partake of the holy spirit. The ground of all being resonates through us all.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know, but I have to answer you in the way I best know how. I am less inclined to personalize the manifestations of the Absolute than are you. It is hard to speak of this, because as Dionysius the Areopagite has said: the finite cannot express encounters with the infinite. The created cannot do justice to the Creator. But I always feel that the spirit of God is within me, that God Himself is the ground of the soul and there is an inward way to Him. When I pray, I am not speaking to some outside other, but to the God within.”

“Yeah, well, does he ever talk back?”

“I believe my prayers are sometimes answered.”

“No, I mean, does he coach you in what to say and make you do things you weren’t planning to do and say things like ‘Where am I? Turn on the lights!’ or ‘Salute one another with a holy kiss,’ or ‘Hey, let me see your vengeance on them?’”

Connie chuckles around his pipestem. “What’s that from? Jeremiah? Lamentations?”

“His remarks are not always original, but given the context, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.” The more words, the more vanity, Jesus is saying now. He has been grumpy ever since they left the studio. Is there no end to windy words? “Right now he is saying, Is there no end to windy words?”

“Job, probably. No, that is not the sort of conversation, if it can be called that, that I have with the transcendent cause of all things. It is more like the immersion of my finite self within the infinite self that is God.”

“You know what? I think you’re just kidding yourself, Connie.”

Priscilla falters at the door of the Italian bar and grill. She can hear men hooting and barking with laughter inside and assumes they are laughing at poor Wesley. He is about all there is to laugh at in this town nowadays. She doesn’t want to do this, but she must. Only she can rescue him. Her dance will be one of great suffering, but the suffering should not show on her face, for it would only be cause for more cruel laughter. She steels herself (she has a little dance for this) and pushes on in, half blinded by fear and shame. The mayor is in there, the former mayor, and two of the church trustees who voted for Wesley’s incarceration, Burt Robbins and Jim Elliott, and they are looking at her with wild grins on their faces. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Wesley is not among them.

“Hey, Prissy!” Jim shouts as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, then heehaws like a donkey and falls off his barstool, bringing fresh whoops of laughter from the others. That her name alone evokes such merriment means they’ve been talking about her.

“If you’re looking for your loony loverboy,” Burt says, unable to speak without snarling through his beak, “he and whoever he was talking to just left.”

“Without paying,” the mayor adds in his booming voice, and the big flat-faced man behind the bar, a squeaky piccolo to the mayor’s bass, concurs.

“I’ll pay his bill,” she says, reaching into her purse, and they all think this is funny, too.

“So, how’s Ralph, Prissy?” Burt asks pointedly, and she decides to ignore that, preferring that they laugh at her silence rather than anything she might say. Jim is still on the floor but able still to emit donkey sounds. “You guys all dancing together now?”

They all laugh at that, but the little roly-poly narrow-eyed ex-mayor with the big nose says, “Easy, Burt. That’s enough.”

Not quite: “I bet you look pretty cute all tangled up in your tutus.”

“Did he say where he was going?” she asks, handing the barman a bill still crisp from the bank and pointing at the slice of lemon meringue pie in the glass case on the counter. She knows she will suffer more mocking laughter as she leaves, but perhaps she can deflect it somehow.

“For here?” the proprietor asks, and she nods.

“Said he needed a bath,” the mayor bellows. “We let him know he could use a shave and a haircut, too.”

“We told him he could also give that inner dummy he was talking to a good soaking,” growls Burt through their sour snickering. “Maybe he could hold him under and drown the sonuvabitch.”

She is somewhat alarmed by this news but hides her emotions behind a dancer’s expressionless mask. She takes the slice of pie off the plate and holds it in the palm of her hand and gazes contemplatively at it as a mystic might gaze at a leaf or a feather, finding the mysteries of the universe contained within it, or as a jeweler might scrutinize a diamond or a pearl. Or Salome, the Baptist’s head, its awesome truth. Slowly she begins to sway, letting her upraised palm trail after her body motion as if it were the head of a snake, she its charmer, only hoping the wooziness she has been suffering of late doesn’t return. She does an adagio glissade toward their table, still swaying, still focused on the pie, and there, while the men make self-conscious remarks about her nuttiness and back off, she mimes the effort to stick a finger from her other hand in it, though it always seems just out of reach. She leans toward it, her tongue out and doing a petit battement of its own, the hand pulling away whenever the tongue approaches. She straightens up, head high, attempts a little fouetté in her street shoes, and swirls gracefully to the opposite side of the room, where she begins to sway again, eyes closed, as though falling into a trance. The mayor applauds and guffaws, setting Jim off again, and once he finally stops his braying, she again glissades, swaying, toward the table, their eyes wholly on her now, watching her hips move, big boyish grins on their greasy faces. “She’s stupid,” she hears Burt say, though really she can hear and see very little, so intensely is she immersed in her performance. She mimes again the attempt to reach the pie with her finger and her tongue, leaning toward the mayor, so that he can see closely the teasing little dance her tongue makes with its étendre movement, quivering toward the elusive pie. He rolls his eyes comically, and as the other two lean close, trying to see what the mayor sees, she moves her arm fluidly from the third ballet position to the fourth and slaps the pie—whop! — in Burt Robbins’ smirking face. He sputters and roars an obscenity and lurches blindly to his feet, the chair crashing against the wall, while she executes a rapid little pas de bourrée en arrière, tippytoeing backwards out of the bar, enjoying now the howling laughter she had earlier so dreaded.

As he steps into the bath, Wesley is thinking about Bergson’s notion that all our perceptions are outside us in the things we perceive, not inside us. Connie Dreyer used it to illustrate the difficulty we have in glimpsing Being through the unreliable scrim of Becoming, which is the world of our sensations, but not the world itself, since our perceptions can never equal the perceived. The only way to see Being truly is by way of direct intuition or inspiration. Revelation. Connie’s defense of faith by way of the likes of Plotinus, Augustine, that Areopagite character. Wesley was able to chip in a remark about John Scotus Eriugena, about whom he had once written a pretty good B-minus paper, but his heart was not in it, as his inner Christ has more or less disabused him of all notions of uroboric wholes common to these flaky Platonic dreamers. Faith, Connie said, is a kind of power: the power to appreciate revelations, which are facts in a way that what we call facts are not. Though one can reason about revelations, they are not a matter of reason but are simply received. In the way, Wesley asked, somewhat testily since he was not being taken seriously, that he has received his indwelling Christ? Connie puffed on his bent briar and said he was thinking of something a bit more abstract and all-encompassing. But the point is (his buttocks are now kissing the hot surface), Bergson uses the sensation of light as his demonstration of the distance between us and our own perceptions, seeing being the closest of the senses to thinking, and as Wesley sinks gratefully into the tubful of hot water (Jesus says: Yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!), he concludes that there has been too little thought about the contiguous and instantaneous tactile perceptions of the flesh, which in the case of a hot tub bath anyway, come close to being the same as the perceived. And, if not, does that place our flesh outside us as well? The whiskey, he feels, is making him quite brilliant.

His route into the manse was via its nether regions, though not by choice. They had changed the locks, both front and back, but not the padlock on the old cellar door. Such a door on his father’s farm led to their tornado and bomb shelter, and Wesley as a boy often used it as his hideaway. He kept secret provisions there in the way of candy bars and jawbreakers, and he did so here in the manse as well: a bottle of bourbon on the pantry shelves behind the paint tins, still nearly half full. While he was down there, he switched on the electricity and the hot water heater. The door at the top of the stairs was secured only with a hook and eye, easy to snap with a little push.

While he waited for the water to heat up, he strolled the darkening manse, stripped of all small and personal items, though still with most of its furniture, some covered with sheets, while outside the fresh rumbles of thunder drew nearer. The eggs, he saw, were gone from the kitchen walls, but not the yellow stains they left. No glasses, so he drank from the neck of the bourbon bottle, Jesus cautioning against it, lest he be filled with drunkenness and unable to find his way out of here and back to the studio again. “Well, you are right,” Wesley said. “I won’t have any. You may have it all.” And he tipped the bottle back, Jesus remarking, with no little irony, Hah! the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? Although everything in the manse was familiar, it was also unfamiliar, for his life had changed and was still changing and bore no relation any longer to these ancient philistine spaces. He could find no towels, but he pulled an old sheet off an easy chair which will do just fine.

The whiskey has indeed put Jesus in a mellow mood, that and Wesley’s decision that they will, yes, return to Prissy and the studio. Jesus is now humming an old church tune, “Where the Healing Waters Flow,” though he seems to be turning it into a kind of torch song: “O, this precious, perfect love! How it keeps the heart aglow!” Women were always important to Jesus and they are important to him now. His intimacy with prostitutes, whose sins he forgave as if they were not sins, got him in trouble with the Pharisees, and his ministry was benefacted by faithful women of means, all women who loved him one way or another. Some bathed his feet in their tears or splashed spikenard on his head, others just hung out with him like love-stricken camp followers. If two lie together, then they have heat, Jesus has said in his ecclesiastical style, speaking from within Wesley’s recumbent body on the studio exercise mats that serve there as their bed (now here in the hot bath Christ has fallen blissfully silent), but how can one be warm alone? From Magdalene, his favorite, he expelled seven demons, and what he said about it was, Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We got on well. And now it is Priscilla. Wesley does not wholly understand his mission, but he knows that Prissy and her studio are part of it. That became transparent to him on his walk today through this hostile wilderness of a town in which he cannot survive alone and from which he cannot alone escape. For the moment he and Jesus are safe here in the manse, for outside a violent storm is brewing and no one will be out in it, but sooner or later they will have to brave it and make their way back to their mirrored refuge and to its peculiar rhythms. Which can be pretty strenuous. He sleeps a lot when Prissy’s not around, just getting over when she is. Sleeps well. Better than he ever slept before.

Priscilla found Wesley’s inner Jesus, whether real or imaginary (imaginary, she assumed then — symbolic, perhaps a way of expressing his prophetic insights), pretty disconcerting at first. Even with his head between her legs, Wesley would go on talking to him, describing what he saw there or arguing with Jesus’ instructions about what to do with his hands or reciting passages from the Bible about perfumes and kisses and gardens (“His branch shooteth forth in his garden” was one of his favorites, his or Jesus’—it was hard to tell). But over time she has come to believe in this Jesus and to wish to please him and to desire him just as she desires Wesley, even if it does make their mating dances feel a bit like group sex. It also raises paternity issues. She is only a week late and she can be irregular, but she just knows through an inner knowing that cannot be denied. Her tender breasts tell her so.

That the conception almost certainly took place here that night of the freak snowfall, and that by chance or some kind of design beyond her understanding they are back here now, and that there is a storm raging outside as though to hide them from the world, all means that her revelatory May Day dance will probably be different than originally choreographed. A pity she didn’t bring the flowers along, but she left in such a panic, fearing she would lose him to those who mean him harm. And, anyway, they will find a use for them back at the studio, perhaps in a kind of sequel, a ritual confirmation of the miracle (call it that: she had always supposed herself congenitally barren until now); dear Wesley is so responsive and so unflagging, a virility she now attributes in part to his ardent indwelling Christ.

Now, sitting on the edge of the tub, she watches the dance of his limp penis in the water as she stirs it (somehow the “Moonlight Sonata” seems right for this), dreaming of the future and of the child that will be borne to them all. The moment the mayor mentioned Wesley’s desire for a bath, she knew where he had gone and she worried for him, exposing himself, brave but foolhardy, to such risks in broad daylight, though she appreciated his needs. In the studio there is only a shower and toilet in a corner behind a curtain, put there mainly for her students as a kind of dressing room, the corner having previously been used for a photography studio and so already plumbed, and the water is usually only lukewarm at best and sometimes little more than a trickle. She thought she might have to break a window to get into the manse before noticing the open cellar door and coming straight up here, where she found him sleeping soundly in the bathwater, snoring softly while the storm crashed outside. Is Jesus also sleeping, she wonders, or is he, in some manner, observing her? Just in case, she has taken her clothes off beside the tub, for she knows it pleases him, and she is excited by his pleasure.

Later, she will bathe Wesley (he has not washed himself, the water is clear, except for where his pipe has fallen into it and created a rather ominous little smudge) and perhaps he will bathe her in turn and she will dry him off and he will dry her off and she will dance her May Day dance for him and with him, and they will run to the car and she will drive him home through the rain and then they will have to take their clothes off again and dry off again and so on, but for now she is choreographing his awakening. She wants it to be gentle, for he may have forgotten how he came here, and be frightened when he first comes to. As much as anything, he likes her to do a grand plie over his face, cunnilingus being for Wesley — and for Christ Jesus, too — a kind of mystical religious experience (she calls it their “Dance of the Tongues” and it is best when they dance it as a pas de deux, or trois; Wesley is a willing participant in all her dances, though he’s not very athletic or flexible, so this is one of his best ones), but that’s not easy in the tub, and it’s probably not the best way to wake up. No, it will be a dance of the fingertips and she will whisper to him about his greatness and her love for him and she will also speak quietly to Jesus, tell him that she wishes to love him and to serve him and that he must guide Wesley and keep him safely within the sanctuary of the studio, lest he fall into the hands of his enemies. They must be prudent. For soon they will be four.

II.5 Saturday 2 May

Saturday night in West Condon and folks are restless and needful, but money is short and nothing much happens without it. Still, they go looking. The pool hall. The Elks Lodge. The roller rink. The bus station and the rootbeer stand. Neighborhood taverns. Mostly dead. The municipal ballpark. Table tennis at the youth center. With dented balls. Legion Hall. Filling stations. Drag-racing up and down empty pot-holed neon-lit Main Street. Making something out of nothing, trying to, a local skill honed by all the bad years. The young with cars end up at the lakes or the old ice plant or out at the edge of town in the abandoned movie drive-in lot or where the big Dance Barn was before it burned down. Listening to music on the car radio. Having a beer and a smoke. Of whatever. The old church camp on the Tucker City road used to be a beer party favorite, but it’s occupied now by those religious idiot-sticks. Still, if you have nothing else to do, you can always drive by and shout out obscenities and throw bottles over the barbed-wire fence.

“I don’t have big ambitions,” an unemployed coalminer is grumbling up at the Eagles social club over a friendly game of pinochle. “Eat and shit regular. Fuck a whore wunst a week. That takes money. Not much. But some. Can’t stand to have a whore look down her nose at me. So I need a job.” The other three at table grunt in agreement, sorting their cards. “Have you thought of taking up whoring yourself?” one of them asks, wallowing an unlit cigar around in his jowls. “They tell me there’s a market now.” “They’s probly a age limit.” Now and then something opens up for a night guard or a short-order cook, a bouncer, debt collector, ditch digger. Shit jobs, but always a scramble for them. They hated the mines — the fear, the hard labor, the black greasy filth, the bad hours — but they miss them. They were a team then, union men. Now it’s every miserable cocksucker for himself. There’s work out at the strip mine, but it’s non-union, and Italians need not apply, the owner and his mine manager being militant racists. They’ve organized their own Klan den, though they call it something else, some kind of holy legion or militia. Guys who work for him say old man Suggs keeps a huge horsewhip coiled over a nail in his office; it’s the first thing you see if you go in there to bitch about something.

Not everyone’s completely broke. The Sir Loin steak house, offering weekend specials (also available during the week), does a little business. Enrico’s Palazzo di Pizza does. The chop suey joint out at the shopping center. The movie house with its pocked screen. The bowling alley. The Nineteenth Hole at the country club, which should probably be called the Tenth Hole with half the course long since gone to weed. Many of those eating and drinking in the Hole have played a round or two today and are now talking about their handicaps and missed putts and the deteriorating condition of the course and of life in general. Expressing their disgust at national politics, the injustice of the tax laws. Bemoaning the lack of downtown business. Wondering why, with all the unemployment, they can’t find a decent cook out here. Commiserating with the former secretary of the Chamber of Commerce after the unexpected overnight restructuring of the city organization that has cost him his job. The town banker who engineered this move on the grounds of saving tax money and curbing corruption is not here tonight, being either at home with his terminally ill wife or off on another business trip, so they can speak freely about him and his bullying tactics, even if his motives are impeccable. The former Chamber secretary has not taken this change of fortune well, but the club members are tolerant folk who can put up with belly-aching drunks when there is cause. The bank lawyer, who will be taking over the Chamber duties and others as a kind of ad hoc city manager, was here earlier tonight, but left before the supper crowd arrived. He is a nice young man and will do a good job, but the ex-secretary is a local pal, even if he is pretty useless, and people feel sorry for him, while at the same time feeling sorry for themselves.

The Hole is accustomed to an early crowd and shuts down early, leaving a long night ahead. Some will meet up at a club bar, others in a neighbor’s kitchen or over a bridge or poker table. Many will retire with a drink to a recliner chair in front of the box. A few, choosing to rough it, will head out to the roadhouses or take in a bit of country music at the Blue Moon Motel.

Sheriff Tub Puller is passing that popular Saturday night establishment and he decides to wheel through the parking lot to see who’s up to what. Looks like a full night. Tub is returning from a Christian Patriots meeting out at John P. Suggs’ strip mine offices, and he is feeling righteous and closely engaged with the way the world works and well equipped to do important deeds. Tub doesn’t share the religious beliefs of most of the other Patriots, preferring not to think about any life after this one, mainly because no matter what comes next it’s always a rough passage, but he is patriotic and he loathes Romanists and niggers and kikes and feels at home with Suggs’ militia. They look up to him as a big man and a leader. And he’s not just an immovable mass, he’s a good marksman, too; people have to admire that. If Tub Puller shoots at somebody, he hits them where he wants to hit them. Suggs’ mine manager, Ross McDaniel, is the only one who can beat him at target practice, and that’s all he can beat him at, except maybe the hundred yard dash. McDaniel is an outsider brought to town by Suggs and even Tub is a little afraid of him. There’s a rumor that his past targets might have included FBI agents and tax collectors and even a sheriff or two. Suggs knows Tub is not a very religious man, but he is cool about it, and Tub can appreciate where Suggs is coming from and respects it. Probably, in the end, he’ll find his way there as well, for it’s a hard, tough religion and the lines are clearly drawn and it has a certain manly appeal.

With a little help from Suggs’ deep pockets, Tub has been putting together a volunteer police unit to deal with emergency situations in the county, and the core of it has been recruited from the Patriots. In fact, they are more or less the same thing. There haven’t been any emergencies, but there are a lot of people around here who don’t see eye to eye, so there are apt to be, and Suggs wants him to be ready. The church camp sect is one of Suggs’ pet projects, and Tub’s troops have already been called out there a couple of times to defend it. Some of his most reliable volunteers belong to that group. Tub’s deputy Cal Smith is an evangelical, close to some of those people, and should fit right in, and for a while he did help out at training sessions, but since Red Baxter’s return, he has begged off, using his family duties as an excuse. Baxter was their section boss in the mine. A man born angry. Tub could go along with the loudmouth’s gobpile oratory back when it was about hours and wages, but then he got religion and became a rancorous pain in the ass. Suggs plainly hates the man and wants him run out of here. Smith, however, came from a family of pentecostals and only got closer to Baxter when Red shifted his hatred from bosses to sinners. In the mine, Tub was a shotfirer, using compressed air cylinders like dynamite to bring down walls of coal, a hazardous job, and Smith was his partner and driller. They hardly ever spoke to each other, but they were a team, so when Tub got elected sheriff, he appointed Smith his deputy, a good man to have at your back when there’s dangerous work to be done. Now he’s not so sure. There’s been trouble at the camp since Baxter’s return. If a line gets drawn, he may find his deputy standing on the wrong side of it.

Tub spots the Cavanaugh station wagon in the Blue Moon parking lot. The college kid’s probably here. He’d love to haul the smartass in for whatever, smoking marijuana or fucking a minor or something. His old man is a target of Suggs’ fury, one of many, and Tub shares his dislike for the banker. For all bankers, for that matter. Fat cats living off the sweat of others. When mines shut down and men are thrown out of work, these are the ruthless decisions of the money-maggots. But Tub is not a vengeful man. In fact, he has few emotions at all beyond a cold scrupulous hatred of a more general sort, and as for the kid, he’d feel out of place going in there in his uniform and shiny boots unless he had specific charges and an arrest to make.

He’s about to roll on out of the lot and back to his West Condon office when he sees them: three overdecorated motorcycles parked back in the shadows. They’d heard a distant growl tonight during the Christian Patriots’ military exercises that was probably them and Suggs had turned his dark scowl on him. Since the break-in and theft at the mine, Suggs has been in a rage about these out-of-town shitheads. So he knows now he has something to do. He could disable the bikes. Or impound them. But he might need help for that. They could come out any minute and they’re probably armed. It’s a Saturday night, and Smith will be hard to find, and the guys who were at the Patriots will be scattered. But no problem. He can handle this on his own. There’s a small secluded pull-off within view of the motel that he often uses to catch drunks and speeders leaving the motel, and after checking in with his radio operator, he pulls in there and turns off his car radio and douses his lights.

Cubano, Littleface, and Juice are sitting at the bar, knocking back whiskeys with beer chasers. Their pals Nat and Houndawg, who have stayed back at the base with Runt, are angry about it, but Juice and Cubano — penned up so long they’re going stir-crazy — decided they needed a social moment before hitting the road again tomorrow, Lit-tleface joining them to try to keep them out of trouble. And the sheriff is right: they’re armed. The place is a miserable dive and the two country singers don’t amount to much, but the Warrior Apostles dig the tunes, Juice bobbing his head to the beat and snapping his fingers, Littleface meditating on the lyrics, which are making him feel sentimental about his life on the open road and about his pals and about his country. And besides, though they’re cut off from the Brunists now, they saw these two yokels doing their act out at the mine hill and so they think of them as in some manner their own people.

There’s a tough, beardy guy sitting alone at the bar dressed in leathers with APACHE painted on the back of his jacket. Might or might not be what his jacket says. Short stocky guy, kind of a buttless tube, losing his tread on top. Worn dusty red cowboy boots with buckled straps over the insteps and tooled scrolls up the sides, pinetrees on the front, which give him class. What class he has. He isn’t flying colors, but he looks solid, so they ask him anyway, and he says no, he thought about buying a bike before he got sent up, but when he came out of the can, he went looking for four wheels, not two, needing something he could live in, sleep in, carry his shit around in. Juice tells him he admires his boots and he asks Juice if he ever did any time — he looks like a guy he’d seen up at the state pen. Juice says not in this part of the country, and asks, “What’d you get sent up for?”

“Laying into a buncha cops.” Can’t help but admire that and they all have another round. They ask him what he’s doing here. “Chasing a woman.”

“Not worth it, man.”

“I know it. Bad shit. It’s over. Moving on tomorrow.”

“Yeah? So are we. If you weren’t stuck in a cage you could join us.”

“Where you headed?”

“Don’t know. But it’s like them two croonies there are singing, ‘They’s always a bus goin’ somewheres.’” They ask what happens next for him and he says he doesn’t know either, but there’s another war brewing, and if they’ll take an ex-con, he may join up. He feels like killing a few people.

They nod knowingly and Littleface says he tried to get into the airbornes but he flunked the physical. Just as well because there was a sergeant there who kept calling him Porky because of his hairiness and he knew he’d end up wanting to shoot that sonuvabitch more than the enemy. Cubano says he might like to fight to get his own country back some day, but he’d have to do it alone because he can’t stand taking orders from anybody. Even his compañero, Houndawg — El Profesor — sometimes gets under his skin. Juice volunteers himself and the rest of the Warrior Apostles to help Cubano out if he decides to have a try, hoping some people there speak Christian English and not that weird spic noise that Cubano lets fly when he’s cussing his bike out.

“So, hey, good lookin’, whadja think?”

“It scared me a little. Especially those lines about back o’ the bus gropes, rhyming with showing young boys the ropes and chasing lost hopes.”

“Them was your lines, Patti Jo.”

“I know, but like something left behind was suddenly real again and me right in it. But it helped to be singing it. Made it seem like it mighta happened to somebody else. And in a way it did. That me’s not me anymore.”

“I’m workin’ on a coupla others. Hope y’don’t mind.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like ‘Trailer Camp Blues,’ fer one. What y’tole me bout bein’ a stake in a poker game. And losin’ your name.”

“Well, I’m never one to stand in the way of genius, Duke. But I like it when you sing them to me in bed first, like with this back-of-the-bus one. It softens them up a little.”

“Softenin’ you up is my A-number-one priority, little darlin’. Nigh time fer another set. We got us a handsome multitude here tonight. The beers’re flowin’ and everbody’s feelin’ juicy and singin’ to ’em is halfway like fun!”

“I suppose after the beers those two kids bought us we owe them that dead mommies thing, but honestly, if I have to sing it or hear it one more time, I’ll throw up.”

“No, I’ll do ‘Love Me Tender’ and lean right over ’em with it and send ’em runnin’ fer the nearest matteress holdin’ on to theirselves. But right now, I reckon it’s more like time t’rare back’n let fly some honky tonk’n a yodel or two. Unload a swot a whoopee. Sing ’em all, around the horn. Y’notice the fireplug over to the bar, by the way?”

“Fireplug?”

“Yeah, short and squat and hard t’pitch to parked on the far stool.”

“Oh, you mean that Apache fellow. The one who turned up this week at the camp. He knew Marcella. He was there.”

“Yeah. Wonder what he’s doin’ here, off from the camp, suckin’ up the hard likker like that. That’s some a them rough biker boys he’s with. Looks as how he’s one of ’em, don’t it?”

“Might be. But he was sure paying a lot of attention when you were singing ‘Take These Chains from My Heart.’ Could be he’s got romancing troubles. He’s wearing a pierced heart tattoo with Clara’s kid’s name on it, but she didn’t appear exactly over the moon to see him. Seems like little Elaine has turned a tad peculiar. They tell me she’s got a whupping fancy. He probably wasn’t ready for that and looks pretty cheesed out. In the next set, let’s do ‘Young Love’ and see what happens.”

“Give him a desprit case a the roarin’ hurtin’ wanta-git-laid long-gone lonesomes, y’mean.”

“Maybe. You never know what a song might set off, though. I knew a guy once, this was out in Tucson, as I recollect, or somewhere in the desert thereabouts. A guy who told me he used to ride his own thumb around the country until some rich dude gave him his pickup truck camper for free.”

“Ain’t nobody gives his truck away free.”

“I know. This guy was kinda scary and had very strong hands. He had the borrow of me for the night and we were having an oiling-up drink in this highway bar with old dollar bills nailed up on the walls, when somebody played ‘Long Black Veil’ on the jukebox. You know, ‘Ten years ago, on a cold dark night, someone was killed, ‘neath the town hall light…’? Well, he got up slowly and walked over there and pulled out a gun and shot that jukebox three times. Then he told everybody to get down on their knees and start praying for theirselves because they were all sinners with murder in their hearts who deserved to die and also to pray for that poor man in the song who was unjustly hung — just like Jesus Christ, he said — and he fired off another shot to make sure everybody was paying attention. So down they went and while they were all fallen on the floor like that, he grabbed me and dragged me out of there and back to his camp, hooting and whacking the steering wheel all the way, and he threw me down and done me every way he could think of. I was working too hard to be scared, but when it was over, he began bawling like a baby, and that’s when I really started to panic and realized I was more religious than I thought I was, and that I totally believed in God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and all the rest of it and just hoped they all had their eye on this poor little sparrow.”

“Well, hah, somebody musta done cuz here you am.”

“Yup. But one of the poor cops bought it who came to arrest him.”

“That’s some story, Patti Jo. Ifn we do sing that ‘Young Love’ song, I sure hope that injun feller ain’t got a pistol, cuz I’d be his damn jukebox, wouldn’t I? Oh. There’s that guy Georgie, jist comin’ through the door. The one who said Marcella Bruno useta be his sweetheart.”

“Georgie…? Georgie Lucci maybe? It’s been decades, and that ape’s badly beat up. Looks like he’s wearing his elbow on backwards, but it could be him. First guy who ever felt me up. In the church on the back stairs down to the basement. Don’t know what I was doing there. Waiting for somebody to feel me up, maybe. I was just a kid then, eleven or something. I don’t think I’d even got my period yet. He was older, already in high school or near to it, but still, basically, just a bad case of acne in pants. If it’s him, he’s a dumbass loudmouth clown. A total jerk. Marcella would not have let him get within a mile of her. Who’s his pal?”

“I dunno. But he looks like one a them jugheads who was tanked up and givin’ everbody a hard time out to the hill a coupla weeks ago.”

“The one who kept standing up and falling down. Problem tonight is they look too sober. I doubt they got two dimes between them.”

Two dimes maybe, not much more. Stevie’s making good money, but he hasn’t learned to count yet and he’s got holes in both pockets. It has been Georgie’s task to follow him around and catch it as it dribbles out and help him spend it in a more useful manner. But there’s nothing more in there tonight. After the mayoral yuks, Georgie got compensatory hazardous duty pay for his visit to Lem’s Garage, but that’s also long gone. He winks hopefully at his scruffy potbellied ex-neighbor behind the bar, but the asshole doesn’t wink back. Just glares. Probably Georgie walked out of here one night forgetting to pay. An honest mistake, shouldn’t be held against him. There are some bikers perched there in black leather and ear studs, looking wired and vaguely dangerous, a dark-skinned greaseball among them, hair slicked back in a duck’s ass. Also a very hairy punk who looks like an overgrown dwarf. If you got the money, honey, I got the time, those two rubes up at the mike are singing as though rubbing it in. It’s party night at the Blue Moon Motel. First time Georgie has seen it as alive as this — they even have bouncers on the door now — and though he lacks the wherewithal to throw himself into it, it cheers him up, suggesting to him that, if they can bring this shabby wreck to life, the resurrection of the body is not an impossible crock after all.

His own will take some work. It’s badly messed up: both eyes blackened, a tooth missing, bruises everywhere, and his shoulder feels like fucking Lem may have busted something when he laid the crowbar on him. Or else he’s just stiffened up from sleeping on a thin mattress on the cold cement floor at the fire station after his old lady threw him out. His nose is running, his crabs are biting, and there’s a clotty feeling at the end of his dick from the dose he picked up on his only foray into feminine flesh since he got back here. Blew his first little lump from his fire department job on her, needing a pro to do the right things, for in his depression he was having trouble getting it up. Turned out the woman was the sister of a guy he used to play baseball with, and though she did what she was paid to do, she was even more miserable than he was and inhabited by this virulent nastiness, which she obligingly shared with him. He’d just been to Big Pete Chigi’s fu neral, where old Bags was doing his Latin thing and the old birds were into their senseless twitter, and he felt like he was dying himself, starting with his shriveled coglioni. Carlo had dragged Georgie out to see Pete in hospital earlier in the week. Hooked up to some kind of green machine that was working his ruined lungs for him. It was hard for him to talk, but he managed to say, “This ain’t no fun, boys. But what can you do? You just keep going on.” And then a couple of days later he stopped going on. You come and you go in this world, but whatever that world was about, it didn’t seem to be about Georgie. It was like big things were happening over his head from which he was congenitally and terminally excluded. Born to miss out. He felt like the little shepherd who had to stop to take a shit and missed the birth of Jesus. He was thinking a lot about Marcella Bruno at that time; those photos he’d seen had a grip on him. Back in high school, he probably saw her with clothes on, but he didn’t remember them and didn’t need to. They might have met here in St. Stephens, he was thinking, sitting there that day among the mourners, all knuckled into themselves and not saying much. In fact, she was probably the only reason he ever went there, to catch a glimpse of her or to bump into her in the nave. She always had a smile for him. Would have had. She was very young then, of course. Some years behind him. Probably why he never noticed her.

The reason he and Steve Lawson are out here at the Moon is to book Steve’s stag party a month or so from now, a lone moment of happiness on the horizon, and to ask those two hillbillies, at Franny’s request, to sing at the wedding, if they promise no religious songs. Georgie has had a beer or two with Duke, talked baseball, women, bad times they’ve been through. When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go, they’re wailing now, call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough, and we’ll go honky tonkin’, honky tonkin’ ’round this town. Sounds good to Georgie, and with an optimistic grin he scans the clapping, hooting, and boozing crowd in search of someone who might stand them both a beer while they do their business. But his gaze falls on Pete Piccolotti sitting in a booth with Vince Bonali’s sexpot kid and two others, including that tall guy he’s seen with little Angie before, and his grin withers away. Young Piccolotti runs his family grocery store and it was Georgie’s job today to do his fire inspector routine and hit the boy up on behalf of the mayor’s campaign. Pete told him bluntly what he thought of him, and it wasn’t nice. They got a gun to my head, Pete, I can’t do nothing about it. I just don’t want you to get in trouble. If you put me out of business, the kid said, you’d be doing me a favor. Now get the fuck outa here, dipshit. You’re making me sick. Georgie feels hated and misunderstood and wants to change his life. He’s a good guy, after all, and doesn’t deserve all this abuse. All right. Lem was pissed off about the car, but Georgie explained to him he had to swerve to avoid a little kid on a sled. Out on the Waterton road? At midnight? Yeah, with all that snow there was a whole slew of brats with sleds out there. No shit. What was Georgie doing on that road in the first place? I took a wrong turning because of the snow, Lem. The goddamn window wipers weren’t working. I couldn’t see a thing. That was when Lem picked up the crowbar.

Duke and his woman are really wound up. Something about her is familiar. Looks like she’s been around. Maybe he ran into her up in the city. Comb your hair and paint and powder, you act proud and I’ll act prouder, they’re hollering now. You sing loud and I’ll sing louder, tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire! The only thing on fire is his crotch. Georgie gives his cooties a scratch, feeling murderous. Like Il Nasone said: halfway through life and what has he got that’s not infectious? His old lady was also a major disappointment, locking the screen door and yelling at him through it. Georgie let her know about all the big connections he’d made in town, how important he had become. But to get anything you had to grease some palms, she knew that, and he was only letting her invest in him. What was the matter? It was just a loan; she’d get it all back with interest. Sure, she said, when the goose pisses, and she told him she’d call the police if he ever turned up at the house again. By then she was screaming and all the neighbors were out on their porches. Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo! Mother love? Forget it. Tonight we’re havin’ fun, we’ll show the folks a brand new dance, that never has been done! Yes, he’d like to dance a new dance, but he can’t see how. He’s completely fucked. All he has left now in his vanishing life are a handful of old jokes that nobody’s laughing at anymore and his memories. Big Ruby, up in the city, bless her splendid creamy lipsticked ass. He thinks of her often. Should never have ditched her. And la bella Marcella. The only girl he ever really loved. The only one who ever understood him. He thinks about her now as he’s last seen her in that photo (he would have busted in and rescued her from that vicious bony-assed scuzzbag, but how could he have known?) and wishes she were with him. I need you, baby, he says. I know, she says, and gently takes his hand. “Hey, whaddaya doin’?” Steve asks.

Tommy Cavanaugh’s old pal and basketball teammate from high school, Pete Piccolotti, is unloading his woes. Business is bad, the supermarkets are eating him up, he’s deep in debt and no way out, that beat-up flunky over at the bar has been trying to shake him down on behalf of city hall, his family grocery store will probably get either closed down or torched, this town is shit, life is shit. Tommy is sympathetic, but he’s also thinking that’s what you get for sticking around here, man, and he’s been telling them about his own plans to avoid the family pressures and get a PhD in sociology and set himself up at a university somewhere far from here, travel around the world on research grants. That upsets Angela, he knows; she wants him right here and in the bank, but she’s trying not to show it and is instead rubbing his cock under the table to remind him of the blessings of hometown life and gushing about how cute the Piccolotti kid is. They are squeezed into a booth across the floor from the singers, he and Angie and Fleet and his wife Monica, who used to be a looker but isn’t now. The lips that used to thrill me so. Teeny Sabatini. Pete played point guard on their high school team, Tommy forward. Fleet and Kit, as they were known then. Fleet was a terrific passer, had great athletic moves, a good jump shot. He could receive a ball and shoot it all in the same move and seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. Though he wasn’t tall enough for the big time, he might have made a college team if Monica hadn’t got pregnant. A cautionary tale. He used to think of Pete as the smartest guy in high school, but the daily grind at the grocery store and getting married so soon, having a kid, have dumbed him down. And he has hardly smiled all night. Now he’s into a really awful rap about putrefaction, Angela having just said she felt so alive tonight, Fleet replying that actually she’s just a dead meat farm, nothing’s really so alive as decaying flesh, which is its natural state. And he goes on to describe all the bruised fruit, clotted milk, rotten tomatoes and raspberries with blue mold, black lettuce, mottled bananas, and stinking gray meat he has to throw out every day at the store, dumping it all in the garbage buckets out back so it can really ball. Monica finally tells him to shut up, he’s being morbid and spoiling the party.

The singers take another break, so Tommy pushes Angela’s hand off his dick and goes to the bar for more drinks. He tries to avoid the bikers sitting there — are these the guys who tried to wreck his dad’s car? — but one of them, the one with APACHE on his jacket, turns to him and says, “Hey, Moneybags.”

“Whoa, that you behind all that face hair, Ugly? Goddamn, what say, man? What are you doing back in town?”

“Just making a cemetery run.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Can I buy you one?”

“Nah. Might end up having to pay interest.”

Same old Ugly Palmers. But he has aged a lot. Doing time has not been good for him. His mad-dog pals are glaring; Tommy decides this is his last night in the Moon for a while. “Well, let’s get together, man, trade some cock and bull.”

“Leaving tomorrow.”

“Coffee or something before you split?”

“I’ll be stopping by Lem’s garage in the morning. Drop by there if you can get out of Sunday School.”

Back at the booth, Angela is talking about the crazy man at the bank yesterday, and Tommy tosses in his own Easter anecdote about the mad preacher, which in turn leads them to the Brunists. Tommy starts to tell them about the research he is doing out there as part of his planned doctoral thesis, but the others say it’s a mistake to pay any attention to them, those loonies all ought to be shot after what they did to their church, certainly run out of the county, their hatred reminding Tommy that he’s the only non-Catholic at the table. He has his own beef: those leeches stole all his mom’s money, but he and his dad aren’t saying much about that, not wanting people to think his mom’s not right in the head, while they try to get some of it back. With Concetta Moroni helping out at home now, his dad is able to catch up on some of his business meetings. Where he is tonight. Part of his ongoing effort, he says, to develop the new industrial park. Useless, but his dad keeps trying. Hometown hero. Or maybe he’s just trying to distract himself from his wife’s dying and her bitterness and her religious nuttiness and all that has led to.

Monica’s mom is babysitting, and they have to get back, they say. “The joys of parenthood,” Fleet says sourly, pulling himself up out of the booth like an old man, and Angela says, “I think it’s great.” Tommy sees that Ugly has his ball cap on and is also leaving. He tosses him a wave and mouths “tomorrow” and Ugly nods back, walks out with one of the other bikers, the funny-faced hairy one with the shirt-button ears. Angela’s hand is squeezing his prick again. “Well, rootie tootie, Kit,” Fleet says in grim farewell, quoting the song they all voted the worst of the night.

Juice, not trusting that fake Indian in the red cowboy boots, has stepped out to wing a wiz and make sure Littleface is all right. And has stepped right back in again, still putting his dick back. Nods at Cubano who leaves his drink to join him and they push out. “Face went left, the Apache went right, but I seen him flash his lights at a car racing up out of the bushes with its lights off. Wasn’t a cherry top, but I think it was that fat sheriff at the crank and going like a bat outa hell.” If they chase after on their bikes, they’ll be targets, so they quickly hotwire a wooden-sided station wagon parked in the lot and leave their bikes behind. A couple of miles down the road, near a stone culvert, they come upon the car Juice saw, pulled off to one side, its headlamps blazing now. The fat man is standing over something in the field, kicking at it, rifle in hand, a wrecked bike nearby. “Stop the fucking car!” Juice is screaming, but Cubano neither slows down nor speeds up. “Ay, guapo, look at me, not him,” he says quietly. “At me, coño! Don’ show him your stupid face! We just only lovers rolling by, not seeing nothing.” “But, fuck, man—!” “We got our little pistola against his rifle, man, we can’ do nothing here. We go get some hardware and ask Nat what to do.”

“If you guys had stayed here like I said,” Nat says, his voice breaking, and there is a bad moment between them. Juice and Cubano know they’ve fucked up but cannot bring themselves to say so, though they are hurting and say they are full of God’s fucking wrath and ready to do whatever has to be done. “We can take the asshole. He’s all alone.” “By now he won’t be,” Houndawg says. “There’ll be fuckin’ bulls all over the place. Was he live or dead?” They couldn’t see much from the road, but it didn’t look good, and the fat man was laying into him with his boot. “The bike?” “Looked hosed.” “Was he wearing his brain bucket?” “Yeah, I seen him pull out in it,” Juice says. “There was this so-called Apache fucker in the bar. Asked a lot of questions. I think he was fuzz. It was him signaled the cop in the bushes.” “Whether he’s alive or dead, they’ll have to take him to the hospital,” Nat says. “Yeah, right! We can rescue him,” says Juice, “and blow away any motherfucker who stands in the way!” “Maybe,” says Nat. “If he’s alive. Let’s go get your bikes before the cops grab them. You two come back here and take care of Paulie. Someone may have seen you. Houndawg and me will see what we can find out at the hospital.”

What they find out is that Littleface’s head has been stove in and his neck broken and he is no more. “Do we go shoot a few people?” Houndawg asks. Nat is crying and full of rage. Houndawg can see something of old man Baxter in him. A round blanched look under his shaved head with reddish eyes on fire. But his voice is ice. What he says is: “No. We’ll get him, I swear. Face will be avenged. But right now we do like we said and bury what we got and leave this place. We need numbers. We’ll take in some biker meets, look up Face’s old gang. The Crusadeers. They’ll want to be in on it. Juice’ll know how to find them.” Houndawg nods. “For tonight we can hang on to the wagon. That stuff is heavy, we can use the woodie to haul it, wreck it somewhere after we’ve buried it all.”

II.6 Sunday 3 May

Once, many years ago, standing up here where he is standing now, waiting, then as now, for the buried sun to push away the stone and replay yet again its bloody crawl from the tomb, he had, like that lunatic John the Seer on Patmyass (a little joke of Sissy’s in her nun costume), a kind of holy vision. It was his first year as a Baptist camp counselor. He was still just a kid, but older than most of the campers, and he had found himself suffering the pangs of first love, a bad case of the dizzying pittypat sort unlike anything he’d known before, for a pretty little girl with dark curls and big eyes and a warm friendly smile. Carl Dean was not accustomed to pretty girls smiling at him like that and it went straight to his heart. She was too young — twelve, thirteen, he not much more — but he projected a long ecstatic future together from that summer on. He couldn’t speak of that, of course. He had to show his affection for her in other ways, teaching her things in a big brother way, obtaining special privileges for her, buying her presents like candy bars and craft supplies, even a little New Testament with wooden covers said by the salesman who turned up at the camp to be made from two-thousand-year-old trees on the Mount of Olives (“Jesus may have prayed under this very olive tree, children!”), and she was very attentive and kept giving him deep admiring looks and big smiles, though she never actually thanked him for anything he gave her. He ached to touch her, to kiss her, even just to hold her hand, but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right. There was a line drawn between counselors and campers and he had to respect that, and anyway, even if it had been all right, he didn’t have the nerve. He adored her and was afraid of frightening her or disgusting her. It was enough just to walk beside her on a nature trail and talk in a soft voice. And then one late afternoon, slipping into the camp kitchen for some leftover tapioca pudding, he chanced on her in a clinch with one of the older counselors, a jerk with scraggly chin whiskers who taught Bible study, bark painting, and volleyball. They were pressed up together against a sink in a passionate kiss with his hand between her legs. She was even raising one leg to try to wrap it around the scumbag’s hip. Carl Dean wanted to scream and throw himself on them and tear them apart limb from limb, but he only backed out silently, almost unable to breathe, and returned blindly to his cabin and fell into his cot with his face to the wall. Where he stayed until the rest of the camp had eaten and prayed and turned in for the night. He couldn’t sleep. Some time after midnight he crawled out and wandered the camp and the roads at the edges for a while, his heart still jammed in his throat, his acne on fire, the sound of their whimpering and grunting in his ears, and then, a little before dawn, climbed up here to Inspiration Point, pulling himself up the path as if dragging himself out of a soul-sucking quagmire. It was sick; they were all sick. He felt an unappeasable anger, a searing hatred, but it was larger than himself. It was a righteous anger, emanating as if from God Himself, he only its instrument, and he understood then that God created sufferers for this very purpose. To bear his anger. To vent it. It was midsummer. The sky was lighter than it is now (it is overcast this morning, dark as night, won’t be much of a dawn), and from up here on the Point he could make out the church camp laid out in the gloom below, the boxy wooden cabins nestled among the trees, as indeed they are now, seen dimly through the budding branches. A deep dank crotch-like odor rising like an evil miasma. And as he peered down on the camp, he felt a strange power, as if, by simply wishing it, he could unleash God’s wrath upon them all, bringing down a great destruction, and all those horrible plagues and woes would start to happen, hail and fire and seas of blood and earthquakes and scorpions like horses, even though he didn’t know what a scorpion looked like when it wasn’t a horse, except that it had a long tail like a coiled whip with a stinger at the end that could paralyze you. And that’s what he wanted: everyone turned to stone. He could not think of a single person in the camp who should be spared. For a moment, though he was only imagining it, it was almost like it was really happening, as if he could actually see the horror—yes! — the camp reddening as if with an inner burning and about to explode (well, the sun was coming up), and all because of that loose little underage twat with the teasing smile; which, now that he thinks about it, was not all that unlike poor Amanda Baxter’s imbecilic grin.

The sad fact is that he has never known how to read the other sex — a huge failing. They’ve always been a total mystery to him, one of the few left in his life, and given his skepticism about mysteries in general, he should probably let go of this one as well, get over all that dumbass awe and respect for girls that make him such a sucker. He’d thought Elaine was different. And, well, hell, she is different. No snatch-grabbing kitchen clinch for Elaine; no clinch of any kind. She’s married to the fucking sky. He saw she’d changed the moment he laid eyes on her that night at evening prayers under the dogwood tree. For one thing she was staring straight at him, and she never used to do that. Not in hatred, but not like she was glad to see him either. Or like she even recognized him. More like: what is that awful thing? She’s taller now, taller than he is, and skinnier than ever, hunched into herself like she always was, yet at the same time more fixed and sure of herself somehow, less afraid. Or maybe she’s still afraid but accepts now what she’s afraid of. A kind of haunted look. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but when Darren and Billy Don showed him that book of photos from the Day of Redemption (it excited him to see her standing there on the Mount, near naked with the tunic pasted against her thin little body, but it also pissed him off that these guys could look at her like that), he saw again that wondering, tentative, nervous yet wide-eyed and tender innocence that he had loved. It said: Help me, I need you. What he aches for. Gone now. When he looked into her eyes yesterday while making a hash of trying to say goodbye, he saw someone else. Someone who wasn’t someone exactly, but more like one of those religious statues with painted eyeballs. Scorpion-stung.

The damp predawn air is full of birdcalls. He recognizes many of them but doesn’t know what names to attach to them. Except the robins, which are always first to start the breast-beating, if in fact they ever stop. Earlier, there were crickety sounds, but they’ve gone quiet. Now and then, the burp of a frog down by the swollen creek, where the trickle of water over its stony bed can be faintly heard. Muffled cracking sounds; some animal prowling about down there on the other side of the creek maybe. Once, he heard Colin crying out in the night. Not for the first time this week. Always sounds terrified. Colin finally opened up to him a couple of days ago. In a manner of speaking. Even though he seemed to have forgotten for the moment who he was talking to. Fucked-up boy full of wacky ideas, which some of the equally wacky cultists here take as visionary. He told him about a weird dream he’d had of Jesus on the cross with his dick lopped off and spouting like a garden hose, Colin holding himself all the while so as not to lose what he had. He also said he’d been talking with their old schoolteacher, Mrs. Norton, the flaky lady who lured them into this madness, and when Pach’ expressed his surprise and asked where, Colin said here. She sometimes visits me at night. Oh shit, man, Pach’ said, unable to stop himself. Colin froze, his eyes widening as if in terror, and that was the end of that. Luckily, he has the preacher’s wife to take care of him, though that arrangement doesn’t seem all that healthy either. She keeps Colin penned in most of the time, treats Pach’ like an alien invader with a rabid disease. Someone was moving around down there in the dark. Might have been her. Also a light sleeper.

He hears a peep that sounds half human. Down in the valley somewhere near the creek. What they used to call Bluebell Valley. Lonesome Valley now, for whatever reason. “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley” probably. Nobody else can walk it for us. Hell no. Maybe that animal down there just caught its Sunday morning breakfast. The other birds stop their racket for a second, the pause broken by the hoot of an owl. And it occurs to him in that brief silence what he’s been missing: the wail of train whistles, the rumble of freight cars rolling along on steel rails. From the camp you could sometimes even hear at night the loading of the coal over at Deepwater No. 9. Instead, far off somewhere, those motorbikes, probably drifting away. Those trains just another reminder that time moves on, things change, you lose some things, get used to it. Kids born today will never know that they ever went through here. The sky has lightened just enough that he can begin to make out the contours of the mine hill. The Mount of Redemption. He doesn’t want to look at it. Makes him sick. Time to piss and go.

Halfway down the hill he meets Ben Wosznik climbing up. They have often run into each other in the early dawn hours, Ben still living by his old farmer routines, Pach’ unable to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time, prison having taught him never to lose consciousness completely. Inspiration Point is a place Ben and some of the others often come to pray, and he asks Pach’ if he’d care to join him now. He’d like to tell Ben what he really thinks about prayer and religion, but instead, loving Ben and unable to hurt him, he only says he has to be by himself right now.

Which leads Ben to ask, “You been up here all alone?”

“Yeah. Who would I be with?” The question rankles him, hitting a sore spot — hadn’t Ben seen the mess he’d made of things? — but it also troubles him. He woke up this morning from a hangover dream about Elaine in which she passed by his van like a ghost and disappeared, and he wonders now if that was really a dream. “Listen, Ben, I gotta tell you, though don’t tell no one else till I’m gone. I’m moving on. I’m glad I came, and it was great to see you again, but I just don’t feel like I belong here anymore.”

“Well, I’m real sorry to hear that, son. We was all sorta hoping… If it’s on accounta Elaine, maybe she just needs a little more—”

“Elaine? She hates me. She told me so. It’s about the only thing she said to me all week. But it’s not just her. You’re about the nicest guy I know, Ben. I wish you were my dad. But I don’t believe what you believe. Not anymore.”

It’s hard to read Ben’s expression in the dark behind his beard. There’s pained disappointment in it and a kind of old-man bafflement, but also resignation. And affection. “Well, Carl Dean, I hafta hope you’ll come back to us. I’ll pray for you and pray God takes care of you, wherever you are. We’ll miss you, son.” And he lifts his arms for an embrace. During which, Pach’, trying not to break into unmanly tears as their beards entangle, his own still damp from the shower, thinks: Ben’s a believer, the man can’t think past that. Another week and he and Ben would have nothing to say to each other. Sad. Maybe it was better to have an old man who puts you off the whole idea of dads forever. The kind he had. Then you don’t set yourself up to be let down.

It was the night before last when Elaine came over to his van on her way home from the Friday prayer meeting, which he’d skipped, to tell him to go away. He hadn’t expected that. It was bombing down rain, and he’d thought he was safe. She caught him having a beer. Seeing her standing out there in her soaked tunic, hair streaming down her face, took him back to the last time they were together, really together, standing in the storm on the Mount of Redemption, holding hands and waiting for the end of the world, and he set the beer can on the dash and stepped out in the rain to join her. Felt apprehensive, yet vaguely hopeful. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he said he was sorry. “Why did you come back?” she demanded. “Please go away!” What could he say? The beer drinking really didn’t matter, he could see that. This was something else. He swallowed, and trying not to look down at her wet body, said he came back because he loved her and thought that she loved him. “That’s stupid. I never did. I was shook up because of my dad dying and all that was happening and I didn’t know what I was feeling. You took advantage of me.” Her voice was breaking and she seemed to be crying, but maybe it was only the rain. There was thunder and lightning, wind in the trees. It was quite a scene. Finally, maybe because he was hurt and wanted to hurt back, he got up the nerve to say that he came back to try to rescue her from all this goddamned craziness. That she should leave it now and go away with him, and she cried out, “I hate you, Carl Dean! You’re as bad as they say you are!” and ran away to her trailer, where her mother was watching from the steps, also getting drenched. Thunder crashed. A fucking nightmare.

His week was up, he should have left. But spent yesterday brooding about it. Teased himself into thinking maybe hate was love. Then, last night, he waited for her after supper. It was a beautiful evening after the storm the day before — not a cloud in sight, the lowering sun casting a soft movie glow on everything, as though promising a happy ending. He was supposed to be standing guard duty with Travers Dunlevy, but he got Billy Don, with whom he’s been having man-to-mans on the subject of women, to sub for him, saying it had to do with what they’d been talking about and promising him it would be the last time he’d ask and that he’d tell him what happened. Elaine was with her mother. There were a lot of other people standing around, staring, but he didn’t care. This was, he knew, his last chance on earth to get through to her. “Things are going to go bad for you, Elaine. When they do, think on me, and how I loved you and admired you. It will ease the pain some. And if you need me, just shout. Wherever I am in the world, I’ll hear you.” This was what he’d meant to say. He’d practiced it over and over. Didn’t happen that way. He only got the first part out. Her mother asked “What?” and he stumbled on the word “loved” and choked up. Elaine was staring right past him as if he weren’t there. Those dead eyeballs. He was halfway between crying and killing someone. In his desperation, unable to speak or to think what else to do, he lifted his T-shirt and showed her the tattoo over his heart. For a moment then, she did look at him. At it. She let out a yip of alarm and buried her face on her mother’s chest. It was as if he’d pulled his dick out and shook it at her. They were both horrified and there was suddenly a lot of hostility all around. He felt like a complete butthead, hated himself, hated everything and everyone in sight and figured they all hated him back. Before they could move on him, he spun around, nearly stepping on little Davey Cravens who’d come up behind him to hang onto his pantleg, and strode away, fists clenched, charging straight at scaredycat Junior Baxter, knowing then he’d have an open path, and he did, fat Junior crashing into the light post in his effort to lurch out of the way. Down in the parking lot, he hauled his leather jacket out from under the tented tarp where he’d stowed it all week, jumped in his van and drove straight out to the motel where Duke and his woman do their singing, proceeded to get thoroughly scorched on the hard stuff, keeping back only enough money to fill the tank.

While Duke was singing “Take These Chains from My Heart,” he made his mind up to stop back at the camp only long enough to pick up the rest of the gear he had stowed under the tarp and then drive off into the night without further ado, but the booze knocked him down and he fell out on the steel bed of the truck while he was loading up and didn’t come around until an hour ago. He’d so absented himself from his body, it was like a kind of dying, as if something had ended and nothing mattered anymore. Hadn’t even closed the van doors. From his headachy dream of the ghostly Elaine passing by, he awoke to utter darkness and a certain confusion of mind. His dream, if he remembered rightly, was also about being buried, and after the storm, there being still a damp earthy smell all about like that of a freshly opened grave, it took him a moment to be sure he was lying in his van and not in a coffin. He ached, rising, as if he’d been out cold for a year. Not used to that. He rarely dropped off that hard even when stoned. Felt sick and had to step into the bushes and throw up. Needed that cold shower and the walk up to the Point and back just to get the blood pumping again, clear some of the pain and thickness in his head. The shower was a smart idea. Last chance for a while, nothing ahead but wash-ups in filling station toilets.

He needs to finish the packing now and move his ass out of here before the camp wakes up and he gets asked too many stupid questions and he starts sounding off about the total craziness of these damned people and what they have done to his old sweetheart, fucking her mind like that as they’d once fucked his. Maybe she’ll come to her senses some day just as he did, though when he said that to Billy Don a couple of nights ago on guard duty, Billy Don said, “I think she feels like she has come to her senses.” He told Pach’ some of the rumors about what she and Junior Baxter were up to. “They want to be saints,” he said. Hurt him, but didn’t surprise him. It was what drove him nuts out on the Mount of Redemption that awful day and got him sent up: she and Junior whipping each other with switches and then she turning on him, screaming at him to go away. There are pictures of that in that damned book, too, almost dirty pictures what with all those wet bodies rolling around and that old lady with her legs spread and him with his stiff prang slipping its bonds. The boys took the book back before he could grab it and rip it up. Well, he went away that day, all right. Away off to a different fucking world. So now the two of them are back at it. The world changes but stays the same. One of the old guys doing his third stretch in the pen told him that. Makes him wonder about those snapping sounds he was hearing earlier from up on the Point, and he turns his head toward the creek. Forget it, man. Not your problem. Pack up your shit and get out of here.

Billy Don is the one guy he’s been able to talk to here, other than Ludie Belle and Wayne. Ben, too, if it’s not anything important. But they’re older and don’t understand a lot of things, or don’t want to. Billy Don is his own age and his gonads are on the boil like Pach’s own. Wears handles over his overbite, shades even at night to hide his wall-eye, drives a battered coupe the color of green puke, is something of a Jesus freak, but he’s easy to shoot the shit with. When Pach’ offered him a beer, Billy Don said he hadn’t touched a drop since he went a bit wild in high school before giving his life to Christ, Bible College being the best thing that ever happened to him. Pach’ could understand that and said he knew where he was coming from, but he offered it to him again anyway, reminding him that Jesus himself was a wino, and Billy Don didn’t take it but he didn’t say no either and there was a flicker of an embarrassed grin under his handlebars. He is one of Mrs. Collins’ inner circle, but Pach’ recognized him right off as a waverer and was able to open up to him, air out his own doubts and where they’ve taken him, confess the real reason he came here, and the hopelessness of it. Women. They ended up talking a lot about women. Which Billy Don knows even less about than Pach’. Like Pach’, Billy Don has also had to deal with a lot of personal insults in his life, being homely and wall-eyed without much of a chin, but he was born with a cheerful nature the way Pach’ was born with acne, so a lot of it rolled off him. Billy Don has the hots for some long-legged college girl with a dirty mouth who told him religion is for wussies who are too chicken to face reality, but in spite of that he can’t stop seeing her, so he’s pretty confused about things right now. Billy Don told him one night on guard duty about a busload of young Christian folksingers from Florida who visited the camp during the anniversary celebrations and underwent full immersive baptism by light, meaning they took off all their clothes and danced naked in front of a campfire, and Billy Don joined in and said it certainly made him feel close to God, if it also didn’t win him any brownie points with Mrs. Collins. He said if he could sing worth a hoot, he’d go join them, and Pach’ said, if you’re going to get messed up in religion, that’s probably the best way to go. When Billy Don asked him if he believed in God, Pach’ told him, pointing up at the sky, “Sure. Look at him out there. He’s what nature is. Big bastard. But he doesn’t think. Only humans think. You could say it’s what’s wrong with them. God doesn’t have that problem, but we like to think He does.” Billy Don shook his head and asked him what he thought would happen to his soul after he died, and he said he didn’t have one and hated the very word. “The only thing it’s good for is as a cheap gimmick in a horror movie. Stop worrying about it, Billy Don. Go screw the college girl and forget the rest.” Which caused Billy Don to duck his head and finger his rifle like it was his own dingdong and grin sheepishly again.

The guard duty bull, like the periphery fence Pach’ has been helping to put up, the barbed wire, the alarm bell, the secrecy, are all part of the sicko camp paranoia. As if the rest of the world cared fuck-all about them. Some of the people in town have been a nuisance, but the novelty is wearing off. And as for the bikers, they made it plain last night that they were clearing out and nothing to come back for. Secrecy. It’s like it was at the beginning when they were meeting in the Bruno house and had all those secret passwords and signs and prayers about the One to Come that they weren’t supposed to tell anyone about. At the Wednesday night prayer meeting, Billy Don took some stick from the older people for hanging out with the college girl, whom he said he was only trying to convert, staring daggers meanwhile at Darren for ratting on him. Elaine’s mother (Elaine wasn’t there; neither was Junior Baxter) said that even if his intentions were good, she did not believe that girl’s were, and he should not risk the safety and security of the rest of the camp by exchanging private information with outsiders and unbelievers. All this was apparently because of a town cemetery tour the three of them had taken earlier that afternoon, looking for the grave of Marcella Bruno. They didn’t find it, but Billy Don told him later they did find an empty grave that might have been hers with two golfballs in it like dropped eyeballs. The main subject of the prayer meeting was the announcement of June 7 as the date for the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Brunist Tabernacle of Light to be built on the Mount of Redemption. Pach’ will miss that one. The choosing of the date had something to do with one of Bruno’s prophecies as well as something the boys saw that day in one of the cemeteries and what Darren called, rather ominously, “certain other developments.” Nods around the room, muttered prayers. Crazy.

Darren’s effort to break up Billy Don and the college girl made Pach’ wonder, so he asked him if Darren had ever made a play for him and that so confused Billy Don that Pach’ figured he had done and that Billy Don wasn’t sure what to do about it. He told him a little about Sissy without admitting to anything, but Billy Don didn’t want to hear about it and changed the subject. That’s probably when he started in about those firelight skinny dancers from Florida, which Pach’ also found tempting and wished he’d been around for, recalling those nights around campfires dressed in nothing but Brunist tunics and underwear. Once upon a time.

His own underwear is freshly laundered, thanks to Ludie Belle — she might have guessed he’d be heading off soon, she does always seem to know what’s happening next — and he’s wearing one of Wayne’s warm hand-me-down flannel shirts with reinforced elbow patches. New patches on the knees of his jeans, too. When he took them off for Ludie Belle to mend, she remarked quite plainly on the size of his cock, which she called his Old Adam, saying she supposed it gave him bragging rights in the shower room, but probably it could sometimes be a nuisance, too, and he said that it was. Such conversations were never easy for him, but with Ludie Belle they seemed almost natural, and they didn’t even cause his acne to flare up. She could talk about such things and about the love of Jesus all in the same breath, which she sometimes did at prayer meetings when things got dull. It was Ludie Belle who brought up Elaine without his even mentioning her name (this did cause his face to heat up), telling him he should not expect too much. “The child is greatly confused.” She did not imply he should give up and leave, but she did not imply he should stay either.

He turns over the panel truck engine, giving it a bit of throttle, and while letting it warm up, scrapes the dead bugs off the windshield and hangs the toe-touching naked lady over the rearview mirror again. The old van has had some hard miles, but it’s ticking along well enough, ticking being the right word for the sound the tappets are making. He’ll drop by Lem’s for a final tune-up and a cup of coffee before he hits the road. Lem has been letting him earn beer money this week at the garage whenever he’s been able to break away from the camp, but there’s not enough business there for a full-time job, as Lem never fails to lament, and anyway Pach’ does not want to waste any more time around here; this story has ended. Some in the camp have probably wondered what he was up to, rolling out from time to time in this old newspaper rural delivery van they still associate with the cult’s Judas (that evil rag is dead and they’re not, as they like to point out), but the black grease on his hands and clothes told them clearly enough where he’d been, and he was able to bring back some gum and candy for the kids, a little act in part to impress Elaine, though it flew right past her. Pach’ is a hard worker, always has been. Even in prison he worked hard. Lem appreciates that, as do Ben and Wayne out here at the camp. Main difference is that Lem’s garage is a crossroads to everywhere — anybody might stop by, even people off the highway — while out here it’s almost like crawling inside your own body, and it makes him realize how unnatural this past week has been for him. Being cooped up all those years has made him the sort of ramblin’ man Duke and his woman were singing about last night at the motel, and of all his skills, moving on is what he does best. He came back here chasing a fantasy — a fantasy just as stupid as religion is. He got rid of that one, now he’s done with this one as well. No more pipe dreams of any kind; he’s a free man, freer than he’s ever been. Or so (the light is on in the Collins trailer and he wonders if she’s wondering where he’s going) he keeps reminding himself.

Among Lem’s customers yesterday was Moneybags’ old man, in to pick up his Continental after its final paint job, Lem having told Pach’ about the beating it took one night from the biker gang, pointing out where all the dents and dings had been. Couldn’t see a single one. Lem’s good. Not that he makes anything at it. He’s keeping everyone’s car on the road but barely ekes out a living, surviving mostly on bank loans. From the pit where he was lubing an aging Olds, Pach’ watched the banker. Looked like a guy who never sweated. The sort who did all his work with a nod or two and people jumped. Strong hands, big shoulders, slumping a bit, thick neck and wrists, a guy comfortable with his weight. His brat’s a wimp by comparison. Pach’ ran into Moneybags himself at the Moon last night. The sonuvabitch called him Ugly as if they were still back in high school. Probably thought he was being friendly. Pach’ wanted to paste him one, but the dumb fuck was not worth the trouble. Moneybags was there with his old high school piece and a couple of other wops. They made a date to meet at Lem’s this morning, so if the jerk shows up maybe he’ll get another chance to offer him a knuckle sandwich. For old times’ sake. Certainly he has a few things to tell the smug bastard. Wake him up to the real world.

Pach’ had been sitting there at the bar with three bikers, who were drawing a certain amount of attention. Warrior Apostles, as they called themselves on their studded black jackets. Decorated with dragons, swastikas, American flags, the face of Jesus. Wearing bandannas around their heads and ear studs. One of them had a patch on his jacket with what looked like Brunist symbols. Though the Baxter kid was not among them, he knew who they were, knew about all the trouble they’d caused, about their killing of Ben’s dog, their trashing of the camp, and so on, but he was drunk and past caring about all that shit and settled for a quiet bull session, fantasizing for a moment about another kind of life. If somebody had tried to throw them out, he would have taken their side as another outsider, and he rather hoped that might happen. Needed a good brawl to get his head straight again. Take on the fucking world. Didn’t care for the spic with the greasy duck’s ass hairdo, reminded him too much of the prison trusty who called him “Tonto” and tried to rape him, and the one who did all the talking was like a raw nerve with a loose mouth at the end and an unwashed mop of hair on top, a cranked-up badass who’d as soon knife you as say hello; but the hairy one with the midget face and no ears was half real and they got on all right. Talking with him, Pach’ could see that bikers had less lonely lives than he had, stuck as he was in his cage, as they called it. He asked them what they were doing hanging out in a shithole like this, and they said they were just passing through, be gone before sun-up. When the hairy one left, Pach’, dough running out and well plastered, left too. They exchanged grunts out in the parking lot and headed off in opposite directions, Pach’ passing a car that came barreling up the narrow road with its lights off. He flashed at it. Caught a glimpse of a fat guy hunkered over the wheel. Hard to tell. No lights on top but might have been heat.

The early morning light is leaking through the thick overcast sky. The camp will be stirring soon, but there’s still time to swing by the lodge on his way out to make himself a couple of sandwiches from the camp kitchen. His week’s wages, so to speak, well earned. When he turns off the motor and steps out of the van, he is struck by the moist dead quiet all around him, and it takes him back to Sunday mornings here at church camp all those years ago, when he’d rise before everyone else and walk into the more remote regions of the grounds to commune directly with God or nature or just with himself as he was then, green and hopeful. Suck up the morning dew. Jerk off. Deep into the summer, there’d be the sweet smell of vegetal decay, the ground hard underfoot, the promise of a hot sun; now it’s softer and denser than that, the greens brighter against the creosoted cedar cabins, even in the gray light — or because of it. There were no postlamps or phone lines then. Looks almost like a small mountain village now, nestled in the trees like something out of a storybook. The minister’s wife has planted a flower garden in front of the cabin next to the lodge that she and Colin are using and it’s in full flower, and there are other sprinkles of color in the high grass, mostly the yellows and whites and pale blues of flowering weeds, which he’s running through now, not knowing when he started, his heart pounding, a cry, a scream, shredding the silence, sounded like his name, his old one, the one she knows him by, racing past the cabins into the wet valley beyond, over tree roots and fallen branches, slashing through the shadowed ferns and sedges at the edge of the creek and splashing down into it in a single bound, stumbling on the stones there, turning his ankle, dropping to his knees in the water, everything slowing down, seeming to, his movements thickening as if in a dream, a terrified yowling, but pressing on, scrambling laboriously up the other side through the shrubs and brambles, losing his footing and sliding back down, clambering up on all fours, headed, he knows now, for that wild place where he used to spy on the minister’s wife, the patch of meadow in the woods, where he can hear voices, stifled laughter, tearing through the thorny forest undergrowth, crashing at last into the clearing, where he expects to find his old nem esis Junior Baxter, and does, but not as imagined, two guys in leather pinning him down on his back, that wild-eyed loudmouth biker and a fierce burrhead, orange fuzz on top, must be Junior’s kid brother, their knives out — are they killing him? — Junior gagged with the biker’s blue dew rag, naked but for what look like girls’ cotton panties stretched over his fat gut, his face bloody, mouth agape, maybe already dead, no sign of Elaine but a scatter of tunics that makes his heart sink, the biker and Junior’s brother rising to meet him, and then he hears her, or hears something, sees her, must be her, a pale naked thing back in the trees, two other guys rushing out from there, the spic and an older guy, blades flashing in their fists, it’s the fucker who set the fuzz on Face, cries the wild-eyed one crouched over Junior, and he knows that to get to Elaine he will have to go through them. His handgun’s back in the van. All he has are his fists. Nothing to do but meet what comes next…

II.7 Sunday 3 May

Debra has left her panties in the woods but there’s no going back to get them now. No going back there ever. It was her favorite place in the world, but she is afraid of it now. She sits in her nursing chair with the slashed velvet seat cuddling a distraught Colin, trying to stop her own crying because she knows it makes him cry, wishing she could seal up this cabin and never leave it. Debra has always been known for her cheerful optimism — Wesley himself used to say she came right out of a Hollywood movie — and even when times were difficult she could always see the positive side, but now she feels utterly destroyed, sunk in that slough of despond she once read about in a book in college and didn’t really understand. In fact, it was just a joke — Wesley’s joke, really. Let poor Christian Pilgrim into your slough of despond, he would whisper, back when he would still whisper such things and do such things, turning it into just a wet sticky place, not a dreadful condition of the soul. Such a place as cannot be mended, the book said: the joke after her hymen broke, thought funny then, terrifying now. An abyss has opened up and nothing is funny. Colin has stopped sobbing but is still trembling like a frightened rabbit, like the little bunny she once had as a child, the one her mother said died of too much loving, and she strokes his silky hair and presses his head against her bosom, which always calms him, trying, as her own tears flow, not to let her chest heave and set him off again.

The day had begun so peacefully, well before dawn. Her worries — about money (it is all gone), about the threat of having to leave their cabin, about Colin’s daily ups and downs and the personal conflicts in the camp which upset him so — had seemed to drop away and a great contentment stole over her, as often happens when she is close to nature, which for Debra is the same thing as being close to God. The sky was overcast. There was no moon and the streetlamps had been turned off at midnight. She felt invisible as she slipped past the cabins and down through Bluebell Valley accompanied only by birdsong, the ground soft underfoot from the recent rain and the padding of long grasses. Instead of crossing the creek by one of the wooden bridges, she decided to take off her sandals and wade over, her toes and the soles of her feet scouting the rocky bed before taking each step like little prowling animals nibbling at the unseen stones. It was deeper than usual and there was an arousing rush of current against her ankles. She paused in the middle, and gathering up her skirt, knelt to scoop up a palmful of water, sipping a drop or two, then washing her face with the dampness that remained, feeling like an ancient priestess performing her holy ablutions. She prayed simply that nothing ever change, her prayer directed to the tender night more than to any being, then stepped on across and slipped her sandals on again. There was a small incline on the other side, and though it was pitch black in there under the trees, she seemed to know exactly where to plant each foot, and she felt full of grace as she rose up it.

She avoided the clearing, partly because the two young people sometimes came there, or used to before that strange ugly man who so frightened Colin turned up, and though she disapproved of their behavior, she did not want to seem to interfere with it, circling around through the trees until she found a little patch of pine needles behind some bushes where she could squat for her morning pee. Which she has always thought of, when able to avoid the suffocating outhouse and steal over to her private garden among the waking birds, as one of the most sacred moments of her day. Not the most Presbyterian of sacraments, but she loves it all the more for that very reason. She has sometimes gone there just as dawn was breaking, the sun’s rays slanting gloriously through the thick trees then as though the divinity were joining her there in a kind of blessing. For fear of alarming the other campers, though she is not at all shy, she is forced to do this on the sly. But in the old days, between camping sessions, when the place was empty, depending on whether or not it was the mosquito season, she often wore no clothes at all around the camp, squatting whenever and wherever she felt like, bathing in the creek, sunning in the small meadow or even amid the bluebells and wildflowers next to the access road or right in front of the lodge on the patch of lawn there, putting her body in God’s hands. And sometimes she didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, accepting their stings like little love bites. The camp has never had a serious tick problem, though there is always a risk, adding an edge of danger to these excursions. People think that ticks drop from the trees, but actually they stay close to the ground and latch on from below. She did once get one and she had to bend over so Wesley could pull it out. He was so squeamish. Finally she had to bat his hand away and do it herself.

She so loved her body then, and Wesley did too, often joining her in the nude. But it never produced anything and Wesley wearied of it and it did start to fall apart and bag on her as bodies always do, and for years since, until now, it has gone largely unappreciated. But that place on the other side of the creek had always been her favorite, her secret corner where she could strip down, even when camp was in session, and lie back in the warm summer sun and close her eyes and listen intently to the musical language of the birds and insects, separating out their voices, deducing the meaning of their calls, and she lay so still that once a little wren actually landed on her and walked along her tummy. Colin’s needs and agitations often make this pilgrimage impossible, but this morning she left him sleeping soundly, hugging his pillow, much buoyed of late by the attention paid him by Clara’s two office boys and the general optimism of the camp. In a few weeks’ time there will be a symbolic laying of the cornerstone of the new Brunist Tabernacle of Light over on the Mount for which there are already finished architectural plans, and the camp itself is becoming more beautiful and functional with every passing day. True, there are some who say that such projects make no sense if these really are the last days, but these are mostly people who are never really happy and who just want something for themselves.

She often leaves her undies back at the cabin, allowing the early morning air to whisper its whisperings without encumbrance, drying herself with her skirt afterwards but, like Colin, she has of late on warmer nights taken to sleeping in her underwear, so she had just pulled on a loose frock as she stepped out into the night, which decision was, as it turned out, dreadfully unfortunate. She had just lowered her panties to her ankles there in the nest of bushes, and bunching her skirt up around her midriff, had started sending a gentle hissing stream into the needles, when she heard hushed men’s voices. There was someone else there in the woods and not far away. She turned off the flow or it turned itself off, stopping as her heart stopped. She was terrified, couldn’t move, couldn’t even lower her skirt. They were grunting and cursing softly and one of them turned on a flashlight for a moment and she saw it was the motorcycle gang. They had shovels and were burying something. A body? It seemed too small for a body. Had they killed another animal? She didn’t see anything after that because she knuckled down behind a thick bush in the little depression there, trying to make herself as small as possible, fearful she was sticking out in all the wrong places, and began struggling, silently, with the tangle of underpants around her ankles, thankful for the racket of the birds covering her own fumblings and rustlings, but, doubled up as she was and stepping on them, she could neither pull them on nor get them off without standing up and making herself known to them. It would be getting light soon. Already she could make out the outlines of things, and she could see her own limbs clearly and knew they could, too, if they looked her way. She was in great danger, and if she had to run she couldn’t. It would be like running in a sack race.

She doesn’t know how long she stayed scrunched down there, her heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird trying to beat its way out, but the dark had been slowly lifting like a kind of dissipating fog and she knew she didn’t have much time. She had managed at last to free one foot so she could run now if her legs would obey her and she took a deep silent breath and prepared to do that. They were faster, she knew, but they didn’t know the woods as well as she did. She figured she had a chance by leading them through the most tangly part. Unless they had guns. Guns! The thought of being shot as she ran refroze her limbs, and she realized she was peeing again, it was trickling warmly down her thighs and into her sandals, doubled under her. She was praying now, not to nature or the night, which was all but gone, but to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and Mother Mary and all the apostles and disciples to please get her out of this somehow. While they worked, the motorcyclists were insulting one another in what they probably thought of as a manly manner, smoking and spitting and cursing the sheriff and other people and threatening to kill everyone. “Cover it up with dead leaves,” she heard one of them say in a rattly growl. One of them, the one with the childish voice, was called Runt and another Jews or Juice and another Face, though he didn’t seem to be there. Jews or Juice was the one who kept talking wildly all the time, often about the one called Face, and the others were always telling him to shut up or keep it down, which was why she knew his name. The voice that was giving the orders, telling the others what to do and how to do it, made a shushing sound and they all grew very quiet. Had they heard her? Maybe they’d heard her heart, which was thundering in her ears. No. Someone was coming. Through the trees she could see the two white tunics and she knew what would happen next. She wanted to warn them but couldn’t.

Neither of them spoke a single word. There were no preliminaries, they simply turned their backs to one another in turn and smartly lashed each other, she with the razor strop, he with the belt — Debra had seen these things before, did not need to peek out at them to know what was happening. At first the strokes were measured and always, she knew, across the shoulders. But as the tempo picked up, the blows might fall anywhere, especially those of the boy, who seemed inclined to throw himself into it with more abandon. They emitted little grunts and whimpers as they swung, and once the girl — poor little Elaine, punishing herself for sins she could not even imagine — yipped in pain, unable to stop herself, a little squeak like that of a mouse caught by an owl. Whereupon the bikers, laughing cruelly, stepped out of the woods and encircled them, their knives out (Debra was watching them now, peeping through the brush, her heart in her throat). Elaine cried out, and then fell silent. The husky boy in the black leather jacket with the high collar, whom she recognized as Nathan Baxter, though he looked changed, rougher somehow, his head shaved nearly bald, took the belt and razor strop away from them and walloped his brother in the chest with both of them at once, flattening him out and leaving him gasping for breath. They stripped them both of their tunics, Elaine now stonily passive, staring off in another direction, as the older man with a braid sliced her tunic down the front with a knife, the downed boy struggling against them until he got a blow in the face from the razor strop. “Look,” said one of the motorbikers, “he’s wearing his chick’s skivvies. Ain’t that cute?” And they all laughed and kicked at him there on the ground with their boots. “What’ll we do with her?” another asked, and Nathan Baxter said, “Whatever. She’s with the enemy.” “Don’t mind if we fuck your girlfriend, do you, son?” asked the older man, his free hand clutching the girl between the thighs, and Young Abner said in a trembly girlish voice, looking like he was trying to smile and was about to cry at the same time, “She’s not my girlfriend. I don’t give a care what you do with her.” Nathan Baxter took a fistful of his brother’s hair and jerked his head up and laid the blade of his knife against his throat and said, “You got me in trouble, man, with that gun you stole. Maybe we oughta do to you what we done to the dog.” And he drew a red line on the boy’s forehead with the point of his knife. The boy started squealing in a high-pitched voice—“No! God! Please!”—and they gagged him with the blue bandanna the noisy one had been using as a headband.

This, Debra knew, was her moment to escape, had been, but she was still petrified, the long knives frightening her even more than guns would, and the moment was already gone because two of them were suddenly heading her way, dragging Elaine with them, still brandishing their knives, the noisy one called Juice or Jews or maybe Choose and a dark one with oily black hair who spoke with an accent, and she had to shrink down again, squeezing her eyes shut as if that could turn the world off. She could hear their hooting and sniggering, all their vulgar remarks about how scrawny the girl was as they exposed the rest of her and pushed her to the ground, then their grunts and heavy breathing, the noisy one complaining how tight she was, the other one telling him to break her open with his thumbs or the handle of his knife if he wasn’t man enough to crack it on his own, and there was some dreadful thrashing about and slaps and cursing and laughing, while out in the clearing the gagged boy was whining desperately through his nose and seemed to be strangling and then he was silent. Debra, who could not have seen anything through her tears even if she’d been watching, was trying to stifle her sobs for fear of ending up like Ben’s dog. What would happen to poor Colin if they rolled her head into the campground? The only thing she had heard Elaine say beyond a single gasp of pain was “Pa…?” which didn’t seem right, but it was what she heard. Lookie here!” The noisy one was back out there in the clearing again without any pants on, his hair flying loose around his head like a nest of snakes. “He whupped her but he never fucked her!” She knew by the sounds behind her that the other one, cursing the child in his native tongue, was taking his turn. Would they kill her when they were done with her? They would. Oh my God. Out in the clearing, the one with the little boy’s voice asked if the girl had hurt him, and the noisy one laughed and said, “Nah, that leaked outa her crankcase, Runt, not mine. A little somethin’ got busted in there.” The older one with the soft rattly voice said, “C’mon, Runt. Take your britches down and I’ll show you how it works.” Those two were now coming her way, too. Debra knew she could not take much more before she lost control and started screaming and it would all be over. The older one and the one with the accent were behind her showing the young boy what to do next, snorting with evil laughter and urging him to keep pushing and pushing, when there was a most horrendous howling out in the clearing like wild savages, maybe the gag had come off the boy, if he wasn’t already dead, and she found herself on her feet, shrieking, bawling, unleashing her own savage howls, ready to die, but nobody was paying any attention, they were all out there in the clearing where there was a lot of yelling and violent cursing going on, only the boy had been left behind, still down between the poor child’s legs, a scrawny redhead, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, his bony bottom bouncing like a windup toy gone crazy.

And then, without even thinking about it, Debra did a very brave thing. She choked down her panic and picked up a thick branch, and just as the boy gave a surprised little yelp, gave him such a blow as might have bashed his brains out, grabbed up the lifeless girl, and half dragging her, half carrying her, screaming for help, hauled her away from there, stumbling through the undergrowth and over one of the bridges, afraid to look back for fear they were chasing her and she’d lose heart and fall down and they’d both be killed.

She was met at the edge of the camp by Ben and Wayne and Welford Oakes running her way, Ben with his shotgun, Hunk Rumpel just behind them in his white longjohns and carrying a rifle, Clara and Hazel and Ludie Belle in their bathrobes, everyone streaming out of cabins and the lodge and up from the camper parking lot, looking shocked and terrified. Clara swept her naked daughter into her arms, the child still stunned, wet eyes staring at nothing, mouth agape, her thin body oddly rigid like a stick figure, blood streaming down her sinewy thighs, her mother wrapping her bathrobe around her and hurrying her away. Debra’s knees gave way as soon as she was free of the girl, and they were all suddenly crowding around her, asking her questions, who was it and what happened, but she couldn’t think, she couldn’t speak, all the tensions of her ordeal were exploding out of her in uncontrollable sobbing, she could only point toward the creek, and several of the men ran off in that direction (and, yes, she who’d always opposed the arming of the camp hoped they would shoot all of them), and then she was throwing up. She was gathered up in hugs and prayers from where she’d fallen, one of the women saying someone should call Bernice to bring out some nerve medicine, Ludie Belle whispering in her ear that it was all right, just fling up, honey, it’ll do you a world, and guiding her toward her cabin, she should lie down a spell, she’ll fix her a cup of tea.

She became aware then that someone else was wailing even louder than she was — it was Colin, running at full speed, round and round in wild circles in nothing but his underwear, yowling at the top of his lungs. At the door of the next cabin, Abner Baxter, the father of all those terrible boys, was scowling furiously at Colin as though it was all his fault and trying to push his youngest daughter back inside not to witness it. Darren and Billy Don tried to catch Colin, but he leapt right past them, and soon everyone was watching Colin or chasing him, and she herself had stopped her weeping. It was Hunk who finally collared him and lifted him up, his feet still churning, and brought him over to the cabin, where Darren and Billy Don and some of the women gathered to help restrain him and calm him down.

Before they could get him inside, however, there was the sound of anguished howls rolling up from below and the men returned, Travers and Wayne carrying Young Abner Baxter under his armpits, the boy dressed only in girls’ panties with blood streaming down his face and hanging limp as a sack of butter from their grip, his toes dragging through the grass, but screaming in pain so at least he was still alive. They dumped him in front of Abner Baxter and Ben, who had a leather belt wrapped round his fist like tape, said, “Pack up your family and get out,” and Colin fell down and rolled around in the twitchy way he sometimes does and started howling along with the Baxter boy.

“What’s all this about?” Abner Baxter demanded over the racket.

“Ask your boy. You got thirty minutes or we’ll do your moving for you.”

He bristled and his neck reddened and he seemed ready to burst into one of his self-righteous tantrums, but then he looked around at all the armed men and at his bawling near-naked son and his chest caved in and his head seemed to sink lower on his shoulders. “But where will we go?”

“We don’t rightly care. Just pack and git. Now.”

“Ain’t them letters writ there on his head?” someone asked.

“Looks as how somebody was tryin’ to use his face for a notepad.”

“Maybe it’s the mark of the beast,” someone whispers.

“Don’t do nuthin rash, Wayne. Don’t go killin’ everbody.”

“Ain’t fixin’ to, Ludie Belle. Only so long as these folks git trottin’.”

And that was all of it she saw because the women bundled her and Colin, still yelping frantically and throwing himself recklessly about, into their cabin and closed the door on the outside world. The women managed to get Colin into his bed somehow and pin him down with his blankets, though he was still yowling. They steered Debra toward her own bedroom at the back, but she chose instead her nursing chair in the anteroom from which she could keep an eye on Colin. Glenda Oakes told him to stop fretting, it wasn’t real, it was all just play-acting, and she cuffed him lightly to stop the hysterics, surprising him into a momentary stillness and shocking Debra just a little. Glenda had some hard candy for him in her pocket. She told him it was magic candy and to suck on it for five minutes and everything would be hunkydory.

There was no tea, so Ludie Belle made her a cup of instant coffee and then left for a while, but some of the others remained, crying and praying and talking to each other as if she and Colin weren’t there, speculating on what might have happened. When Ludie Belle came back, she said she’d gone to the office and phoned Bernice and also Mr. Suggs and told him to bring the sheriff and then called Duke L’Heureux and some of the others to come out right away, and she shooed the other women out (“Something’s on fire!” Glenda exclaimed, and Ludie Belle said, “Ain’t nuthin but a little bonnyfire,” shutting the door behind her) and closed the windows and tsk-tsked that Debra had let her coffee go cold. She said she should lock the door and get some private time, so as to recollect herself and settle the boy down. Before that could happen, Ben Wosznik stopped in still carrying his shotgun, to thank her and see how she was and to ask if there was anything she could tell him. She tried, but she still couldn’t speak. She only started crying again, and Ludie Belle said Sister Debra was still in a state of shock, that they should maybe wait until after Bernice got out here, and she asked him if Young Abner told him anything. Ben said that the boy was out cold when they found him and the only thing they could get out of him after they’d dipped him in the creek to bring him around was that it was his brother Nathan who cut him. “What was he doin’ with them bloomers on?” “I don’t know. Was it them motorcycle boys down there?” Ben asked, turning toward her, and, still crying, she nodded. “Carl Dean’s panel truck is parked out front and he ain’t nowhere around. Was he there too?” She was confused about this, but she nodded again, and Ludie Belle said Duke told her on the phone that Carl Dean was drinking last night at the motel with the bikers and left with them. Ben stood there slump-shouldered for a moment, shaking his old head, and then he and Ludie Belle left, Ludie Belle giving her a sympathetic hug and telling her not to worry about church this morning, everybody would understand.

With everyone gone and the door locked, Colin, still trembling and whimpering softly around his jawbreaker, has crawled out of his bed and into her lap on the nursing chair. She holds him close and strokes his hair and tries to pray, but cannot summon the words for it, feeling more distant from God and Jesus than at any time since she first moved to the camp. Of course, she is grateful to have survived — it was a kind of miracle really, so it could be said her prayers have been answered. But why has she been obliged to witness such horror in the first place? She sees again the long knives, the snarling cruelty on their shadowy faces, hears the dismaying sounds behind her, the grunting, the sinister laughter, and finds that she is crying again. It was terrible, but there must be a reason. She has not always been a good Christian and has often been a doubter of the stories that get told, but that God is purposeful and that His purposes are loving she has never doubted. She sees it in the birds, the flowers, the way a tree grows, the way the stars are born and take their places. If God is not purposeful, then nothing means anything, and that is an unbearable thought. And if He is not merciful, then He is a kind of monster, and that would be like saying the sun is cold and bad is good. God is God and cannot escape his own self-definition. I am that I am, He said so. Wesley taught her that. God, as he used to say, is not free, which is of course a very Presbyterian remark. From the Brunist point of view, God has a story to tell, but humans, through their actions, help him to write it. It’s mostly a happy story, but it has its gruesome side, and maybe she has been given a glimpse of that. The basic plot is all laid out and irreversible — it’s almost as though, in some other notion of time, it has already happened — but the details are obscure, only hinted at by prophecy, and the characters are interchangeable. One cannot choose to be among the communion of saints, but one can seek to be.

In her old life, her frivolous empty-headed one, the Book of Revelation was an inconvenient and somewhat hateful tag-on to the gospel of love, one that never fit her view of things, but it surges through Brunism like the swollen creek through the camp. God and His living metaphors: let him who has eyes see. She is learning. Loose the four angels, He said. Actually, there were five of them this morning. The fifth angel in Revelation is the one given the key to the bottomless pit, isn’t that right? The one who bosses the other four and whose kingdom is full of darkness and pain? And there were more angels in the prophecy. More to come? Does this make any sense? Was God speaking to all of them through Elaine’s ordeal with Debra as His witness? She thinks of herself as an unlikely receptacle for prophetic knowledge, but the same could be said of Giovanni Bruno. She will read that book again and think about it and share her thoughts with the two boys, who are better at understanding such things than she.

The shouting outside has died down. Deeper quieter voices have prevailed. The thought of leaving this cabin and facing the world again, even the little world of this camp, is almost unbearable, but she will have to do that. As for the larger world, it is beyond their reach, for they are penniless; what they have is this little cabin. Perhaps she will heat up some water and give Colin a soothing bath in the new washtub. Something worshipful to do in place of Sunday service. It would soothe her, too. Colin sighs tremulously or moans softly from time to time, but he has stopped shaking and may be asleep, and she has stopped crying, too. She has made a nest for him with her body, her broken-winged dove. Though he is cuddled up tight, gripping her breast as though to keep from falling, his thin white legs are asprawl, and she knows that they present an image not unlike that of Jesus being held by his mournful mother after His descent from the cross. Except that Colin, though as pale as the dead Jesus and not very well, is very much alive. He lets go of her breast now and takes her hand off his hip, where it had been resting, and slides it to his penis. He often sleeps this way when he crawls into her bed, his penis soft then, his underwear damp and sticky. It’s not exactly right, but it always makes him feel calmer and she thinks of it as a necessary sedative and a kind of therapy. This morning, though, his underwear is dry and his penis is stiff, like a wooden clothespin. She wraps her hand around it as he wraps his hand around hers. He makes sudden little jerking movements, gripping her fist, and then there is a hot warm flow—“Mother!” he whispers, “Oh! Mother! I love you!”—then sinks away, sound asleep, dead to the world. Debra, cupping his wet pouch protectively as a mother might her newborn’s tender little head, is crying again.