“It was a live child, Jim, not a dead martyr. The spirit of the war died with the suffering of Kim Phuc. She lived. Her life changed history.”

He pressed on.

“Jim, there is no Life magazine anymore, no set of black-and-white photographs that the whole world accepts as truth. No one reads newspapers or magazines anymore, and no one looks out the window. That’s not how it works.”

At this, Golly lurched up. Finding his balance, he wallowed aggressively across the creek, his entire body flushed with fever, his skin tags abruptly crimson and vividly trembling. He slapped the water and howled from William Butler Yeats into Fanta’s face.

“ ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer! Things fall apart! The center cannot hold! Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world!’ ”

“Jim, listen. I can bring the world to you. Tomorrow.”

“ ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed!’ ”

Fanta turned his face away from Golly’s rancid breath. “Yes,” he said, staring up through a mass of caterpillars backlit by the merciless sky. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed… on YouTube and Twitter.”

“ ‘And everywhere,’ ” Golly railed against the aching bones of Fanta’s head, “ ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned!’ ”

“Yes, Jim,” he tried to agree, fighting with a sticky throat, “but this isn’t World War One or Vietnam. Go ahead and burn yourself if you believe you have to. Tomorrow, if you want to. Just don’t eat anyone else. All we need is a video clip.”

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!’ ”

“Yes. Yes, believe me, I know. I’m looking at it.”

“I will live!” Golly roared.

Between them, another great gout of gas broke the surface. Fanta stopped his in-breath, waited, waited, refusing to inhale the digested out-breath of a cannibal.

“Somebody knows that I came here,” he wheezed at last, remembering yesterday’s call to Vigdis Torkelson at the library. “I’m a friend of Sheriff Heidi Kick,” he added. “I promise you she’s looking for me, and she’ll be here soon.”

Golly floundered back, pushing waves, and whistled sharply through his teeth. In moments Tippy appeared out of the deep forest shadows, Faith trailing with her rifle.

“Kneel,” Jim Golly told Fanta minutes later, after Fanta had hobbled at gunpoint across Hell Hollow to the shallow grave that must have been dug and escaped from yesterday by the dead man in the ditch.

“Face away.”

Fanta looked at Golly one last time. Still nude except for his water shoes, he had pinched thick glasses onto his swollen head so that he could see to shoot. Kaleidoscopic. Fanta understood now why the man in the ditch had been shot so erratically from point-blank range. Faith rounded up the victims. Golly did the honors.

Now she handed him the rifle. Fanta knelt, faced away, toward the looming early moon.

“Whatcha think, Faithy? He just seems like potatoes to me.”