“So you’ll miss a day. I’ll bring you back tomorrow.”

“No,” she repeated. “The last time it was three days.”

“I promise.”

“What’ll I do while you’re working?”

“You could see the Capitol or the zoo or something.”

“I don’t think so.” She made an adorable little face. “I don’t want to wait around all day.”

“I’ll get Abby to drive you back.”

“He’s got classes.”

“He won’t mind.”

“No,” she said with finality, and I turned and walked off.

Down the rutted driveway, along the switchback road, I swerved my neck now and then, scanning the empty countryside for a hitch. She had hesitated. She had said, “I don’t think so,” and then, severely, “No.”

I was beginning to feel better. It started to rain. The rain felt good, fresh and soft and cool. I had her phone number. What if I called her? Would she go out with me? Impossible, she’d have to hitchhike. Would she make me over, a stranger, a child, a freak? Certainly it was a fantasy worth pursuing down a rainy road. She invites me over, her old man is out of town for the night, tracking down a new grungy bathrobe, and I…

The car approached, a rusty old bull-bitch of a Chevy sedan, the tires bellowing in the rain. I raised my thumb. The car snorted past, spraying me with a curl of water like a wave boiling over. It roared on, but not before I recognized the couple in the front, beyond the blisters on the window, and Abdul in the rear. The old bull-bitch plunged on, diminishing, swallowed by the next switchback. I dug my hands deep in my pockets and kept walking.

FIVE
CONSOLATION

He strides athletically into my dark chamber, enshrouded in a tangle of hair that covers his face and his gaunt frame. Gym shorts as brief as a bikini support little more than his modesty.

The Reverend Doctor Dewey Lipgloss—just what I need—raises a benedictory hand in a striking simulation of his statue in the square, his tapered fingers slightly splayed, ready to field a blessing or a high fly ball. His attitude of athletic piety must have been familiar to those who knew him when he first came here, before the war, righteously armed with his trusty antimasturbatory tools—tennis racquets and golf clubs and a fundamentalist Bible. But that was before he renounced baseball and Jesus in one fell swoop to embrace all the virgins of his wide-ranging parish. He’s a bristlycoated little animal with a thicket of wiry hair on his face and body (a source of fascination to many Assamans), and on his pedestal in the plaza that’s all he wears.