Flenco hugs his skinny body tight and feels one of his emaciated wrists. Hands that used to hold a silver microphone hang limply from his cadaverous arms, all speckled with liver spots. She wants him to hold on a little longer because she doesn’t know if the healer has worked his way up to raising the dead yet. She knows a little of his scanty history. Born to Christian Seminoles and submerged for thirty-seven minutes in the frigid waters of Lake Huron at the age of fourteen, he was found by divers and revived with little hope of ultimate survival by firefighters on a snow-covered bank. He allegedly lay at death’s door in a coma for nine weeks, then suddenly got out of his bed, ripping the IV tubes out, muttering without cursing, walked down the hall to the intensive care unit where a family of four held a death vigil over their ninety-year-old grandmother fatally afflicted with a ruptured duodenum, and laid his hands on her. The legend goes that within two minutes the old lady was sitting up in the bed demanding fudge ripple on a sugar cone and a pack of Lucky Strikes. Fame soon followed and the boy’s yard became littered with the sick and the crippled, and the knees of his jeans became permanently grass-stained from kneeling. The walking canes piled up in a corner of the yard as a testament to his powers. A man brought a truck once a week to collect the empty wheelchairs. He made the blind see, the mute speak. A worldwide team of doctors watched him cure a case of wet leprosy. The president had him summoned to the White House, but he could not go; the street in front of his house was blocked solid with the bodies of the needing-to-be-healed. People clamored after him, and women for his seed. The supermarket tabloids proclaim that he will not break the vow he gave to God in the last few frantic moments before sinking below the waters of Lake Huron: if God would bring him back from a watery death, he would remain pure and virginal in order to do His work. And now he has come south like a hunted animal to seek out the legions of believers with their sad and twisted limbs.

“Flenc,” Mr. Redding coughs out, “How many goddamn times I told you … oh shit … not to … aw hell, ahhhhh.”

The tent is down, the rain has ceased. The footsteps of many are printed in the mud. He’s had to sign autographs this time, and fighting the women off is never easy. They are convinced the child they’d bear would be an Albert Einstein, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Tom Selleck with the brain of Renoir. Some tell him they only want him for a few moments to look at something in the back seat of their car, but he knows they are offering their legs and their breasts and their mouths. He can’t resist them any more. He’s thinking about getting out of the business. The promise has already been broken anyway, and the first time was the hardest.