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“I cain’t argue that.”

“Help me up, will you?”

Ethan Riser’s friend remained motionless.

“What are you looking at?” Ethan asked.

“I thought I saw a reflection of some kind up there on that hill.” The young man removed a small pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and adjusted them to his eyes. “I declare, it’s a book.”

“A what?”

“Yeah, its pages are fluttering on top of a rock. Cain’t anybody say people in Southwest Texas aren’t literary. Stop looking at me like that, Ethan. There’s nobody there. It’s just a book somebody left on a rock.”

PREACHER JACK COLLINS was reading in the Book of Kings, the wind and sun on his face, when he glanced up long enough to see the single-engine plane coming out of the southeast, its wings tilting in the updrafts, its engine sputtering as though it were low on gas. He stepped backward into some piñon trees growing out of the rocks, his body motionless, his face pointed at the ground, his thumb inserted as a bookmark in the pages of his Bible. He heard the plane pass overhead, then the engine caught again, and when he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked between two boulders, he saw the plane disappearing over a long stretch of flatland, its wings level and parallel with the horizon.

Feds? Maybe. Probably a rancher who was burning the valves out of his engine with ethanol. Jack resumed reading in his comfortable spot among the rocks, the pages of the Bible as white as snow in the sunlight, the print on them as clear and sharp and defining as the lettering that Yahweh had seared with a burning finger in the Mosaic tablets. For Jack, there was no such thing as “interpretation” of the Scripture; there was also no such thing as “metaphor.” These were devices that allowed the profligate and the libertine to consecrate behavior that made Jack’s stomach curdle.

Homosexuality? Sodomy? Not exactly. It was a type of behavior that somehow remained nameless. It was more like a memory or the shadow of a person or an event that hid behind a corner on a long street he was forced to walk in his sleep. The street was uniformly gray, as though all the color had been leached out of the concrete and asphalt and stone. There were no people on the sidewalks or in the buildings, and when he crossed an intersection, he hoped to hear a roar of traffic or at least the footsteps of other pedestrians on a side street, but instead, he heard no sound except the pounding of blood in his ears.

In his dream, he would try to wake himself before he reached the last block on the street, but his willpower had no influence on his dream. At the corner of a building on the end of the street, a figure was moving into full view on the sidewalk. The figure wore a hooded workout jacket and a print dress and pink tennis shoes and a sequined belt, as though she had dressed randomly off the rack at a Goodwill store. Everything about her was in some fashion a frightening contradiction. She looked too young and pretty for the damage the world had probably done her. Her mouth was down-hooked at the corners, her brow dimpled with anger, her eyes lit with a quiet scorn that showed she was not only privy to Jack’s most private thoughts but disgusted by them. Her meanness of spirit and the depth of her disdain for him did not seem to fit with the youthfulness of her face. How could he possibly understand the physiological riddle that she presented to him?

She beckoned to him, confident he would come to her, even as she removed her belt and wrapped one end around her palm.

When he would wake from the dream, he would sit on the side of his bed, his hands clenched between his knees, filled with self-loathing that seemed to have no cause.

The degradation that invaded his soul in his sleep never left him during his daylight hours, unless he could transfer its origins onto someone else. It might have seemed a twisted way to think, Jack told himself, but he did not invent the world, nor did he create the people who had bedeviled him without cause for a lifetime