“Back here, in here, he,” the woman rants.

“You know, he, by golly, our field,” the farmer raves.

The healer is afraid they’re going to smell his breath and he turns his face from side to side as he’s dragged with feet sliding to the back room, inside the closet, down hidden stairs revealed by a trapdoor. The farmer unlocks a door in the dark, hits a switch. A light comes on. Gray walls of drabness lie sweating faintly deep in the earth’s damp, and they’re hung with old mattresses, brown with spots. The furniture in the room is soft with rot, green with mold. A large naked, drooling hairy man sits playing with a ball of his own shit in the center of the room, his splayed feet and fuzzy toes black with dirt and his sloped forehead furrowed in concentration. He says, “Huuuuuuuurrrrrnnn …”

The healer recoils. The hairy man sits happily in the center of the floor amongst plates of old food and the little pies he has made, but looks up and eyes his parents and the paling youth between and instantly his piglike eyes darken with total ignorance or, like the darkest of animals, an unveiled hostile threat.

“Hurrrrr,” he says, and swivels on his buttocks to face them.

“Sweet Lord Jesus Christ,” the healer whispers. “Get me out of here.”

“Not so fast, young fella,” the farmer says, and unlimbers from a back pocket a hogleg of Dirty Harry proportions, backs to the door behind him, locks it, pockets the key deep in his overalls.

It doesn’t smell nice at all in this dungeon and the thing before him begins to try to get up on its knees and makes sounds of wet rumbling wanting deep in its throat. The eyebrows knit up and down and together and apart, and the healer draws back with his hands up because the man is sniffing now, trying like a blind calf to scent his mother, maybe remembering milk.

Mr. Redding lies back in the seat not even harrumphing but merely jackknifed into the position his wife has seated him in, like a form set in concrete, while the truck roars down the road. Flenco slurps the sediment of her shake through the straw and flings the used container out the window into a passing mass of sunflowers’ bright yellow faces. Her right hand is clenched upon the wheel and her foot is pressed hard on the gas.

“Hold on, baby,” she says. “I don’t know where he’s at but we’re going to find him.” Her mouth is grim.

Mr. Redding doesn’t answer. He sits mute and unmoving with his head canted back and lolling limply on his neck, the squashed knot of his reversible fishing hat pulled down over his ears. He seems uninterested in the green countryside flashing by, the happy farms of cows grazing contentedly on the lush pasture grass, the wooded creeks and planted fields within the industry of American agriculture thriving peacefully beside the road.