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version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots.
    The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out.
    I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview.
    He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear. Along the populated beach were tanned, bemuscled men; women whose hands bore diamonds the size of gumballs. I tried to roll the window down more, but it stuck about halfway. He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid . On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn?
    I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath.
    He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers.
    That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that.
    He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down.
    I nodded at the King James Bible cadence he’d slid into, his accentno longer evoking Grandpappy on the porch with a slab of pie, but a preacher whose fire and brimstone maybe came from a guilty conscience about underage choristers. I tried to adopt the big-eyed face of a church girl with a well-armed brother. A crumb of fear.
    He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip?
    No, sir, I said.
    He said, Not a pretty habit on a young woman. After an awkward silence, he added, Here’s the real truth, if you can dig it. He reached into the backseat and handed over a bedraggled paperback whose inside-back ads involved books on UFOs and Nostradamus.
    Looks real interesting, I said.
    You believe in presences? he said.
    I lied that I knew ESP and ghosts existed, though I believed in nothing, naught, nada . (When I got to college and found the word nihilist , I’d glom onto it the way a debutante does an alligator handbag.)
    He shook his head. Those are just circus tricks for the weak mind.
    That’s when I noticed that no aspect of this hillbilly matched up with the surfboard lashed on top. Sam’s sunken chest meant his only swimming included water wings. Or —the ghost of reason said to me— when he was weighing down corpses in some black sunken lagoon .
    He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don’t. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.
    He studied me in black-eyed silence for a while. You’re not a Jew, are you? I didn’t peg you for a Jew.
    Me? No, sir. Actually, do you know a good church around here for me and my fiancée? As if, I thought, I’d ever enter a church other than carried by handles.
    He spat in a coffee can and pointed out my window, saying, Look at this cathedral we been give here.
    Sun was spattering the indigo water with silver sequins. Girls who seem to have stepped from chewing gum commercials jogged in bikinis along the shoreline. It was a lobster-salad-eating crowd.
    I said, They say it never rains here hardly at all.
    With two fingers, he stroked the edges of his thick mustache like some diminutive Chinese emperor about to sign a death order. He said, We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin. He paused to spit in the coffee can. He said, I can see past this day to the time when these same waves will be made of blood. You