The dashing young preacher swore he’d sure acted real real bad, via pills, booze, and do-anything B-girls, sometimes four at a time. (Four women, not just four pills.) The more ladies he admitted waking up with (“wives of friends and, Jesus can forgive anything, the wife of my older brother, the war hero, Christ forgive me what I did to her in front of those young girls, what I did to/with/and/on my sister-in-law and what the other teen Jezebels forced her to perform on them during, oh, do pray for me”), the more the kid conceded, the more his congregation loved him for confessing, the more cash spilled his way, and the more his donors agreed—despite all his vices’ excesses—the boy had not lost one inch of his fine looks.

Dad slumped beside his deflated tire at the back of a defrocked former circus tent. Dad stretched out guilty on the ground, dust to dust, flat to flat. He liked to say his life had spun before his eyeballs as he wallowed there in circusy sawdust. He said he saw what they claim a drowner glimpses. “Your life flashes before you—highlights, like. Scenes. Whole perfect Christmas-card-colored pictures. Your Hit Parade of the good times and bad. But spelled in pops, like a set of news-camera lightbulbs going off …”

Clyde swore as how his conversion moment registered like this: till that moment, he’d always breathed through his mouth, and afterward he discovered what the person’s nostrils were drilled there for.

•  •  •

Eight myself, I always pictured a short series of fairly sad events. They’d be lighted like the diorama gallery of some local-history museum—lit too much from directly overhead. I pictured Clyde’s lean parents changing towns real often. I saw the helper, blue-black “Aunt” Sutie, staying put and taking him in. Museums should be phoned. To show successfully his sin-soaked life: Clyde as a train brakeman’s only son, his dropping out of high school to live with Aunt Sutie in her tin can of a hut, the revelation of haberdashery, the pleasure of finding he’d been fated by God for fatherhood.

Listening to his born-again account emerge again, I shoehorned Dad into every picture he described, making each one go more glamorous and movie-ish.

But I sometimes found to my horror, that the man I’d cast in Clyde’s part soon quit looking Clyde-like. Homely Melvin Delman kept swelling into some beefcake film star of the day, a Jeffrey Hunter or Rock Hudson, who, by scene three, somehow turned around and had the head, then hair, then face of Dr. Dick Dix. I canceled that, but Dad’s own cheering grin kept switching back to Dix’s self-satisfied smirk. Even in fantasy, Clyde’s kisser would simply not equate on the silver screen. Not in the pipe-and-jacket role of “Dad.”