Ig grabbed the door and tried to push it open and climb out, and Lee stepped forward and kicked it shut. The plastic of the dash blackened. The windshield began to soot over. Through it Ig could see the night, and the drop of the Evel Knievel hill, and the river was down there somewhere. He reached blindly through the flames and found the gearshift, slammed it into neutral. With his other hand, he released the parking brake. As he lifted his palm from the gearshift, tacky strands of plastic came away, fusing with skin.

He looked again through the open driver’s-side window and saw Lee sliding away from him. His face was pale and stunned in the glow of the moving inferno. Then Lee was behind him, and trees were beginning to rush past as the Gremlin tilted forward down the hill. Ig did not need the headlights to see ahead of him. The interior of the car produced a soft golden rush of light, was a burning chariot that cast a reddish glow ahead of it into the darkness. Comin’ for to carry me home, Ig thought randomly.

The trees closed in from above, and brush swiped at the sides of the car. Ig had not been on the trail since that time on the shopping cart, more than ten years before, and had never ridden it at night, or in a car, or while burning alive. But for all that, he knew the way, knew the trail by the plunging sensation in his bowels. The hill got steeper and steeper as he went, until it seemed almost as if the car had been dropped off the side of a cliff. The back tires lifted off the ground and then came back down, with a metallic, bashing sound. The passenger-side window exploded from the heat. The evergreens whipped audibly by. Ig had the steering wheel in his hands. He didn’t know when he had grabbed it. He could feel it softening in his grip, melting like one of Dalí’s watches, sagging in on itself. The front driver’s-side tire struck something, and he felt the wheel try to twist free from his grip, turn the burning Gremlin sideways, but he pulled against it, held it on the trail. He couldn’t breathe. All was fire.

The Gremlin hit the slight dirt incline at the bottom of the Evel Knievel trail and was catapulted into the stars, out over the water, a burning comet. It left a coil of smoke behind, like a rocket. The forward motion opened the flames in front of Ig’s face, as if invisible hands had parted a red curtain. He saw the water rushing up at him, like a road paved in slick black marble. The Gremlin hit with a great wallop that smashed the windshield in at him, and water followed after.

LEE TOURNEAU STOOD ON THE RIVERBANK and watched the current slowly turn the Gremlin around so it was pointed downriver. Only the back end stuck out of the water. The fire was out, although white smoke still poured from around the edges of the hatchback. He stood with the wrench, while the car listed and sank a little deeper, following the current. He stared until a sliding movement near his foot caught his attention. He looked down, then leaped back with a revolted little cry, kicking at a water snake in the grass. It slipped past him and plopped into the Knowles. Lee retreated, his upper lip curled in disgust, as a second, and then a third, slithered into the water, causing the moonlight on the river to shiver and break into silver pieces. He cast a final look out toward the sinking car and then turned and set off up the hill.

He was gone by the time Ig rose from the water and climbed the embankment, into the weeds. His body smoked in the darkness. He walked six shaky paces, across the dirt, and sank to his knees. As he flung himself onto his back in the ferns, he heard a car door slam at the top of the hill and the sound of Lee Tourneau turning his Caddy around and driving away. Ig lay there, resting beneath the trees along the riverbank.

His skin was no longer a pale, fish-belly white but had assumed a deep red burnish, like certain varnished hardwoods. His breathing had never been so easy, or his lungs so full. The bellows of his ribs expanded effortlessly with each inhalation. He had heard one of those ribs snap, not twenty minutes before, but felt no pain. He did not note until much later the faint discolorations of month-old bruises on his sides-all that remained to show he’d been attacked. He opened and closed his mouth, wiggling his jaw, but there was no pain, and when his tongue searched for the missing teeth, it found them, smooth and whole, back where they belonged. He flexed his hand. It felt fine. He could see the bones in the back of it, the rods even and undamaged. He had not been aware of it at the time but saw now that he’d never been in pain, all the while he burned. He had, instead, come out of the fire unharmed and made whole. The warm night air was redolent with the smell of gasoline and melted plastic and scorched iron, a fragrance that stirred something in Ig, in much the same way Merrin’s odor of lemons and mint and girlsweat had stirred him. Iggy Perrish closed his eyes and drew restful breath after restful breath, and when next he looked up, it was dawn.

His skin felt stretched tight across muscle and bone, felt clean. He had never felt cleaner. This was how baptism was supposed to feel, he thought. The banks were crowded with oaks, and their broad leaves fluttered and waved against a sky of precious and impossible blue, their edges shining with a golden green light.

MERRIN HAD SEEN THE TREE HOUSE among leaves that were lit just so. She and Ig were pushing their bikes along a trail in the woods, coming back from town, where they had spent the morning as part of a volunteer team painting the church, and they were both wearing baggy T-shirts and cutoffs spattered in white paint. They had walked and biked this particular path often enough, but neither of them had ever seen the tree house before.

It was easy to miss it. It had been built fifteen feet off the ground, up in the broad, spreading crown of some tree Ig couldn’t identify, hidden behind ten thousand slender leaves of darkest green. At first, when Merrin pointed, Ig didn’t even think there was anything there. It wasn’t there. Then it was. The sunlight reached through the leaves to shine against white clapboard. As they went closer, stepping under the tree, the house came into clearer view. It was a white box with wide squares cut out for windows, cheap nylon curtains hanging in them. It looked as if it had been framed out by someone who knew what he was doing, not a casual weekend carpenter, although there was nothing particularly showy about it. No ladder led to it, nor was one needed. Low branches provided a natural series of rungs leading to the closed trapdoor. Painted on the underside of the door in whitewash was a single, presumably comic sentence: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.

Ig had stopped to look at it-he snorted softly at what was written on the trap-but Merrin didn’t lose a step. She set her bike down in the soft tufts of grass at the base and immediately began to climb, jumping with an athletic self-assurance from branch to branch. Ig stood below, watching her make the ascent, and as she worked her way up through the boughs, he was struck by her naked brown thighs, smooth and limber from a long spring of soccer. As she reached the trapdoor, she turned her head to look down at him. It was a struggle to move his gaze from her cutoffs to her face, but when he did, she was smirking at him. She did not speak but pushed the trapdoor back with a bang and wiggled up through the opening.

By the time he poked his head into the tree house, she was already pulling her clothes off. The floor had a little square of dusty carpet on it. A brass menorah, holding nine half-melted candles, stood on an end table surrounded by small china figures. An easy chair with moldering moss-colored upholstery sat in one corner. The leaves moved outside the window, and their shadows moved over her skin, in constant rushing motion, while the tree house creaked softly in its cradle of branches, and what was the old nursery rhyme about cradles in trees? Ig and Merrin up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. No, that wasn’t the one. Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop. Rock-a-bye. Ig closed the trapdoor behind him and moved the chair over it, so no one could enter and surprise them. He undressed, and for a while they went rock-a-bye together.