The road turned into a bridge, and the Volkswagen skimmed a level path across the river, like a hovercraft. Then the bridge turned back into a road. The trees began to thin out. He saw a sign for Damascus, then another, smaller sign made of two flat wooden triangles nailed to a post. The triangles were painted white and bore words so small that Frankie had to come to a full stop and lean into the windshield to read them.

Turn
Here for
The Gallery of
The Eleventh Coming

said the top one, and beneath it:

Rev.
Damien Lee
Wheeler (Every-
Thing Seen Is for Sale.)

Just in front of the sign stood a mailbox with a number that matched the one on Frankie’s Rolodex card. He steered the Volkswagen along the dirt road that led into the marsh.

He’d sketched a road just like this recently. Smears of brown pastel rose on one side of it, snakes of blue pencil reaching across a green plain on the other. But in the sketch there’d been a church as large as an airplane hangar, made entirely of polished steel, and all he saw when he rounded the bend in the dirt road was a small, salmon-colored shack of a house.

It sat on cinder blocks in the middle of a clearing of damp grass. The clearing was fronted by a thick wire strung waist high between a series of fence posts and hung with wooden placards that nearly reached the ground: calendars, he noticed as he pulled up alongside them, each one heavily illustrated. When he shut off the engine, a kinetic silence rose from the ground and hummed against his ears, hindered only by the sound of a cicada, and then shattered completely by the shriek of a screen door.

At the top of three bowed steps, a man stood in an open red bathrobe, a V-neck undershirt, dark slacks, and a pair of hunting boots. His fingertips beneath the cuffs of the robe, his exposed wedge of chest, his neck and face—all were a deep, rich brown. His bald scalp reflected the sun as if his skull were a light source. He was staring at Frankie behind the wheel of the Volkswagen.

He looked livid.

Frankie got out of the car. He stood holding his keys with both hands, dodging the angry gaze by studying the calendars strung along the wire.

“Have you been sent?” the Reverend asked in a voice so low that he seemed to be speaking through a cardboard tube.

“Yes,” Frankie said. A gallery owner in Jacksonville had introduced him to the Reverend’s work, showing him several original pieces, and slides of a dozen more. But then he added “No,” because the owner had refused to give him the Reverend’s address, and when she’d left the room, he’d swiped it from her Rolodex.

“You’re not sure which one?”

Frankie shrugged. “Maybe both.”