Jesus expelled the demons from the freaks and then sent the fuckers into a herd of swine and drove them headlong over a cliff, John read a year later, trying to find his way into some kind of answer, attending a Bible study at the local evangelical church, reading the passage and then saying fuck this and getting up and walking out to the back of the building where kiddie swings made movements in the wind. He heard the soft squeals of the pigs in the air as they made lopsided motions over the edge, the thuds as they hit the ground. He read somewhere else, too, that driving out the demons only leaves a large, vacant recess into which more evil slips.

You see, to tell it as a story or even a series of actions would be to make sense of it and to lend it some kind of orderly function in the world; that’s why it is only referred to by the media as the incident—the girl’s name, of course, withheld to protect her future; and her muteness, her silence, around the event was part of that withholding; in the horrifying darkness Ned went in and did what he did, and it was the basics that held sway in the public mind: the entering of the dark room, the violation of the safe, almost sacred silence of night, the pink ruffle curtains and the canopy bed.

Zip sensed right away that Ned had gone and done it again, something mighty bad. Dawn was pink along the horizon. A brush of high ice clouds licked the sky. Both men hunched beneath blankets, unwilling to leave the herringbone, slip-proof surface of their beloved merry-go-round. They heard the tink, tink of metal adjusting to the cold and, when the wind rose, a rattling of the Ferris wheel guy wires. Might as well be any place on earth as being in this town, Zip said softly. The talk was like that, soft, with a fibrous quality. Smell somethin’ bad coming in this air, Ned, he said. Off far in the trees, like a bit of lint in a comb, there was the sound of the sirens—the rescue crews and cops, all the attendant caregivers coming to open the girl up with their interviews. He knew it would take them a while to pry out the story from her scared soul—if the truth were told, he had, for a small second, a flick of remorse for the other side of the world (as he thought about it): the dark brooding spirits that his grandmother used to mutter about through her leathery lips—there is a darkness in the whiteness of that world that I shouldn’t bother with if I were you, boy. You’re a fucking Indian squat, nothing more, and don’t forget it. So he got his rucksack from the trailer, stuffed it as quickly as he could, gave Zip a kiss on the mouth, and went off to find the interstate, where if he was lucky he might catch a hitch someplace else. He’d change his name and identity, find a new way of showing himself to the world, and then hook back up with the carnie the way he had before, just shaving off his beard and getting his hair cut short in the back and then going right up to Nate and asking for work (Nathan would know damn well that it was Ned with another name and face). The carnie was heading west, he knew, and would hit a few pathetic state fairs as sideshow backup and then a few Ohio town festivals before the tremendously boring hinterland towns of Indiana (that’s where he would finally reunite with his beloved Zip).