Sullenly, the boy looked over. Bob saw “boy” was the wrong word. Guy was maybe in his mid-to late twenties, though still riddled with the face blemishes of adolescence, while the features of his face had gone all lumpy with excess weight here as on his body. He made the briefest of connections, then bobbed away.

“Sometimes some fellas come in. New fellas,” he finally said. “Don’t seem no Baptists though. Seem more like hoodlums. Tough guys, don’t know where they’re from. Just show and buy up beer and Fritos and smokes and pork rinds, keeping to themselves, paying in cash, making comments about Lester’s store and how shitty it is. Don’t like ’em much.”

“Good,” said Bob. “Thanks a lot.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy.

Something reminded Bob of a certain kind of young marine, the loser kid who joins the Corps as a way to start over, to have a new life, to do something well and right. Some of ’em don’t make it, and it’s just more fuck-ups until they’re gone with a new set of grudges. But now and then you find one who gets to the top of the hill and goes on to become a real marine, and maybe has a life he couldn’t have imagined when he was fat, pimply, and sullen without friends and hated by everyone, most of all himself.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No sir.”

“It ain’t my business, but a young fellow like you shouldn’t be cooped up in a nowhere place like this. And those guys, Baptists or not, are right about how shitty Lester’s store is.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy. “I know that.”

“Can’t you get a better job?”

“No sir. Can’t seem to get my letters straight. Didn’t do well in school, quit after two years. Don’t test out good enough to get into the service. Like to be in the Air Force, work on planes. Love planes. But can’t pass the tests. Lester’s only fella that would have me. I think he knew my daddy.”

“Maybe you got something wrong with your eyes or some little deal in your brain makes you see the letters in the wrong order. There is such a thing, you know. You should look into it.”

“Yes sir,” said the fellow.

“You should get yourself tested.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I can tell from the way you say it you don’t mean a word of it. Son, don’t give up. Take some free advice from an old goat with a limp who’s been around a block or two in his time on earth. Some social service deal in town or off in Bristol or wherever will test you for free and if you have a thing wrong, come up with a way to fix it up. Give it a try. You don’t need to do this shit forever.”

The boy looked at him from darkest abject misery, then smiled. It seemed nobody had ever talked to him like a human being before. The smile showed surprisingly good teeth and maybe a little brainpower in the eyes.

“I will look into it,” he said.

“Thatta boy,” said Bob.

“By the way, that Baptist place got to be the old Pioneer Children’s Camp, where I think a man hung himself when they caught him diddling little children back some years. I heard someone rented and moved in. It’s four miles up on the left, black metal gate, locked all the time. They painted it over so the black is shiny but I don’t think they changed the Pioneer sign.”

“You do know a thing or two,” said Bob.

Bob got there soon enough, and it was as the fellow had said, the gate was newly painted though the sign that read PIONEER CHILDREN’S CAMP was still shabby with age. A dirt road led off into the forest, disappearing as it wound through the dense trees in a few yards. The gate was still sticky in the August heat and it seemed a lot of bugs had landed and found their fate to be paralyzation in the thick goop someone had slopped all over. Bob looked for a way in, thought it wrong to just climb over the gate, and then saw a ’70s-style intercom relay on the gatepost.

He pushed the sci-fi plastic Speak button.

“Hello there.”

Through a rattley smear of electricity the answer was nothing more than a “Can I help you?”

“Name’s Swagger,” he said. “My daughter was the one nearly killed in an accident on 421 on Iron Mountain out of town last week. I’m looking into the circumstances and have information suggesting she stopped off here. Was wondering if I could talk about it to someone, the bossman I guess.”

The cackly soup recommenced to jabber from the speaker and Bob thought he heard a “Certainly.” A clunk of some sort announced that the lock had been sprung from afar, so he opened the gate, drove through, then closed it behind him. The road twisted through trees, then between a couple of foothills, and came finally to an open valley behind elevations that formed obstacles that were green and high but somewhere between hills and mountains. Maybe what eastern people would call mountains, but certainly not what a westerner would so label.

He saw a small, white chapel standing alone; a barn; a kind of exercise yard of pounded dirt; a schoolbus, yellow in the sun; a dormitory, and a kind of gymnasium, all of the buildings constructed with sturdy tin, tin-roofed, and a little shiny. Ballfields, basketball courts, and the crater of an old and unfilled swimming pool also used up the open space until the forest took over again, and shortly thereafter, the mountains began their skyward inclination.

He parked next to the bus in a parking lot where a lot of vehicular traffic had worn a lot of grooves. But no other machines were in sight, and as he closed his door, he looked up to see an old buzzard in some kind of powder-blue three-piece suit approaching, a cross between Colonel Sanders and Jimmy Carter, with the former’s corn-pone stylings and the latter’s hidden hardness of spirit.

“Mr. Swagger, Mr. Swagger, we are so sad about your girl,” said the man, rushing urgently to him, laying a little too much courtly southern-style bullshit on him.

Bob stretched out a hand, felt a grip stronger than you might expect, saw blue, deep eyes, pink skin; smelled cologne, saw white fake teeth and a bristle of a genteel mustache, as the older fellow announced himself to be one Reverend Alton Grumley of the New Freedom Baptist Church, Hot Springs County, Arkansas. He was up here with a constituency of young men who wanted quiet and solitude to pursue their Bible studies. The Reverend had waves of moussed hair-possibly real but almost certainly not his own by birth-and the pinkness of the overscrubbed. He told Bob that he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted and the Reverend would answer any question.

“Sir, thanks for the time.”

“Come on in, set a spell. I’ll answer any question I can to put your mind at ease. Oh, the poor dear. That’s sad, and a parent’s pain is sad as well.”

The buzzard, fretting about Nikki, led Bob to a porch that overlooked the athletic fields, and in time a well-prepared young man in a white shirt and dark trousers came out with a pitcher of iced tea, and the two men sat talking and sipping.

“She was such a nice young lady,” said the Reverend Grumley.

“My first child,” said Bob, “so you can see my concern.”

“How is the dear girl?”

“She shows signs every day of improvement. Yet she’s still in that coma. They say she could come out at any moment, or never.”

“Don’t mean to give you worries, but have you thought of moving her from Bristol? To a bigger city with more sophisticated hospitals?”

“Actually, I already did that. She’s in Baltimore now, where they’ve got the best medicine in the world.”

“I see,” said the Reverend.

“Yes sir, the world famous Johns Hopkins.”

“I have heard of it,” said the Reverend. “I’m happy she’ll have the best care. She’s fortunate to have a father who has resources.”

“The horses have been kind to me. I own a series of lay-up barns across the West, where they take their horses seriously. What’s the money for, though, if not your own children?”