Here one should make one final note about the archaeological theory—often cited in historical studies of Christ—that a great dust Christ was spotted near the Galilean town of Capernaum by shepherds, who shrugged the Christ dustman off as yet another one of many such aberrations, even, some say, as a mild annoyance.

* Bear dust ghosts in no way count as dustmen. Dustmen are a rare phenomenon, whereas dust animals and dust figures are spotted daily during the dry seasons, more often than not taking the form of pigs, pug-nosed animals, and, frequently, goats.

CARNIE

The carnie rose slowly, a ragged display that no one seemed to notice until it was completely up; at least his daughter didn’t notice it until, passing on the way home from school (John picked her up most days when he was working the night shift, buying and selling power for the local utility), she spotted the Ferris wheel and begged him to take her, to let her go. You’d have thought it was the first time she’d seen a Ferris wheel, the way she went on about it, he told his wife later. Carnivals were risky affairs, with their inept machinery, assembled in haste, and above all the hawkers and roadies, halfwits and assorted drunks, riffraff who had traveled to the ends of the earth and were the worse for wear. He saw them come through town when he was growing up in Illinois: souls lost to the tedium of taking tickets and standing hours in the hot sun helping people on and off rides. Deep inside (it is safe to say) John had a healthy respect for them, a high regard for the extremes that roadies were seemingly able to put up with. He loved the dusty, half-mown fields where they usually set up, the way late-afternoon light drove through the tangle of equipment.

But his respect wasn’t enough to put his fears aside.

Consider Ned Alger. Ned manned one of two machines, depending on what his partner, Zip Jones, felt like working; if Zip was running the merry-go-round, Ned would take his shift at the Romper ride, a wide spider of metal fatigue flinging kids in sloppy circles. None of the rides worked at full speed. If you were to look, you’d see Ned standing with an absent, empty look on his face watching the machine run; you’d see his nervous tic of crossing his arms over each other, up high across his chest, and heaving great bellows of air in and out, as if he’d just lifted himself from an exhausting swim. He suffered from the cigarette dangling off his lips. If you were to spend a day watching the two of them go from one machine to the other—silently changing places with an unspoken commitment to breaking up the tedium—you’d wonder, What currents exactly kept Zip and Ned together? What bonds—sacred and otherwise—held them fast? Truth was, they were linked simply by their point of departure: both joined the carnie when it was passing through a small town in Ohio. Zip was hitching aimlessly from the west and needed some cash. Ned, who was living in the town at the time, saw a help-wanted flyer in a Laundromat and decided it was his chance to see the world.