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“Thank you for giving us the guitars,” he said.

He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.

“Fuck you,” Clyde said.

Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw he…

“Keith is not good,” Wanda said, “but he is resting comfortably at home.”

“How bad is it?” Russ said.

“He is resting comfortably but I am told that he is very weak.”

Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telli…

The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from …

Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacan…

What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Rom…