Flenco gooses it up to about sixty and reaches over briefly to touch Mr. Redding’s hand. The hand is cool and limp and she’s glad the fever has passed. He’ll feel better now and he’s had a nap, maybe, not be so irritable. Maybe she can talk to him reasonably. His temper’s never been good even when he was sober which hasn’t been much these last twenty years. Flenco wonders where all those years went to and then realizes that one day just built onto another one like with a mason stacking bricks. All those nights in all those beer joints with all that singing and stomping and screaming and women shouting out declarations of desire for the frenzied figure that was him just past his prime blend together in her mind and spin like carousel horses in a fun-house ride. They billed him as Uncle Elvis, and he’s told Flenco a little about his one trip up the river and how they’d hit you in the head with something if you didn’t act right, but those days are long gone and what does it matter now since the cars he stole were transient things and even now probably lie stripped and rusted out in some junkyard bog, a hulking garden of flowers adorning their machine-gunned sides?

Flenco feels guilty for feeling her faith sag a little when she thinks of all the miles of roads the healer could be on and how easy it will be to miss him. She wonders if it was smart to abandon her big billboard sign by the side of the road and take off like this, but she was feeling the grip of a helpless sudden hopeless inertia and there was nothing to do but put some road under her wheels.

Flenco glances at Mr. Redding who is still oblivious to everything with the wind sailing up his nostrils. She takes a hefty slug of the beer between her legs. She nudges him.

“You want some of this beer, baby? You still asleep? Well you just go on and take you a nap, get rested. Maybe you’ll feel better when you wake up.”

Flenco hopes that’s so. She hopes for a clue, a sign somehow, maybe that gathering of the crippled in a field like she’s heard happens sometimes. If she can find him, she’ll deliver Mr. Redding into the healer’s healing hands herself. But if she can’t, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She feels like the eleventh hour is fast approaching, and her beloved sits on the seat beside her in stony silence, his mouth open, his head canted back, the wind gently riffling his thin gray hair now that his reversible cap has blown off.

“I think maybe they need a little time to get to know one another, mama, what do you think?” the farmer says.

“That might be a good idear,” the mother says. “Leave ’em alone together awhile and maybe they can play.”