Fanta had looked at his plate of untouched food: the stewed tomatoes, the stripped sweet corn, the soft squashes, the oozing slices of melon. He had looked at Golly’s wine-purpled tongue. He recalled a line from the letter he had brought along on his search for FROM HELL HOLLOW.

Today I partake of the Body of Chris…

Was he understanding now? Chris without the t? A guy off a street corner, not the symbolic Son of God?

Wanting to bolt upright, Fanta had felt stuck to his chair. He had seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He had felt his pig valve flutter and stick. He had heard himself croak, “Tapping fellow humans? What does that mean?”

Golly raised his hairless eyebrows. “Food is medicine, yes? Read the Chinese. The fix is in the flavors. But, alas, my vegetarian therapy has been too indirect and too slow. Look at me. I won’t make it the two weeks to get to France unless I accelerate my treatment. But now, Mr. Fanta, you…”

He canted his skull and peered across the table, seeming to study Fanta closely: My vision is kaleidoscopic… you are carved into a dozen pretty pieces. “You don’t look much better than me.”

“What is your treatment?” Fanta had demanded. “What’s in the food?”

“Faithy, give him wine.”

“Lower humans? Who are they?”

“Wine.”

“No. No wine. My glasses, Golly. Give me my keys, my wallet, and my glasses. I’ll follow the road back to where I left my car.”

“But Tippy doesn’t want you to go.”

The huge dog awoke.

“I’m leaving now,” Fanta had asserted, and continued in his dizzy head: And sending my friend Sheriff Kick in to visit you.

“But Tippy doesn’t want you to leave.”

He had tried once more with all his might to rise. It was more wine, the next green bottle itself in Faith’s grip, that had clobbered him.

He hobbled—What flavor was arriving?—and fell into the scalding morning sun. With his bruised brain pounding, Fanta watched through a blur as out of the sod garage emerged a dirty-shaggy-hungry kid, some mother’s beautiful lost boy.

The kid grinned. He had been homeless, it appeared, hard-worn by the road but still at a fresh age, a teenager. He held a tattered black backpack. The child took in Golly—the horror of the man—and he took in the half-buried sod huts amid the isolation of Hell Hollow, and still he grinned. He pushed knotted blond hair from his eyes. His bones and muscles moved. He made peace signs with his fingers. He made a plus sign. Then fixed his hands into the shape of a heart.

“Amen,” intoned Jim Golly as he shambled forth in his soiled saffron robe. He spread his arms to the boy.

“Welcome, Lamb of God.”

CHAPTER 25