Willis would polish his glasses in the same studied way each time and begin the process of categorizing the client to himself: honest victim of passion, career criminal, charming sociopath, or dim-witted fool? He’d learned over time that the list of types was depressingly short. Because he came from their world, was born to lies and small-town poverty, it was almost impossible to fool him, or elicit the easy sympathy city people dole out for almost any hard-luck story if it’s told out on a country road. By the time Willis Good put his glasses back on, more likely than not, he understood you better than your mother did.

Willis spotted Dr. Poole outside on Main Street, the doctor’s black face shrouded by a heavy winter coat, edged in white sheep’s wool. Poole came out of Gloria’s Organic Cafe and walked toward his office. He’d always liked the doctor; always saw him as some great Moorish caliph. It had been Doctor Poole, when Willis was a teenager, who had come to his house and given his mother—a notorious town drunk—the B12 shots that helped her beat the disease at last. And he’d done it for free. More importantly, the doctor was someone Willis could look up to after seeing so many failures troop through his mother’s bedroom. As a young man, he’d wanted to be like Poole: cool, intelligent, kind, and emotionally steady.

Willis put his hand on the thick Plexiglas window of his cell, which had been scribbled on by a thousand drunks. Perhaps, he thought, the doctor would believe him. How could he warn people of the danger if he was locked up in here? Willis watched Dr. Poole make his way along the snow-plowed street. A long way from Granada, Willis said to himself. The doctor’s blackness stood out against the snow that caked the tops and hoods of cars. With a finality that Willis couldn’t postpone, Poole disappeared into his office.

The Christmas lights strung over the street below, swaying slightly in the wind, brought back his lonely nights of wandering. He could picture himself as a child, seeing the lights twinkling joyous and hopeful at Christmas time, reminders that families, and Christmas, and normalcy, were out there and that he would have his own family someday. His future family would be like those he saw on TV: perfect.

The town’s Christmas lights had reassured him that he only had to wait for that day to come. He would go to Timberline’s Catholic church and sit in the empty pew, in the early morning, after his peregrinations. And later, during the nine-o’clock mass, Willis, along with old ladies bundled against the cold, would kneel for the beginning of the service.

“This is the body and blood of Christ,” the old red-faced priest would say, holding up the chalice at the center of the little mountain church, built small and low to withstand all that God could throw at them in winter.

Willis would walk back afterward through the snowy streets to his mother, who would meet him in the hallways of her alcoholism, her face soft and pale from crying in fear that he had frozen to death. They would not speak more than necessary, neither wanting to hurt the other on Christmas day. There would be no presents. The house was violated by vodka bottles. His mother tossed those miscreant things out into the snow, somewhere. Their labels were garish, red and silver, and sad like his fatherless life. His mother thought that the snow would, and could, hide them forever. But by spring, the bottles surfaced in the backyard like bad memories, necks exposed by Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was his favorite holiday; it was when Willis, proud to be a Catholic, would go and get the black cross painted on his forehead so the townspeople could see that he was pious, and not at all like his damaged mother.

       Willis heard loud coughing and spitting sounds from the next cell. He wished to God that someone would wake him from his nightmare. This is, after all, the year of our Lord 2014. How could it happen? Because of his success, he’d thought he had beaten the odds poor people face.

I almost escaped, he thought, staring down onto Main Street that was coming alive now. But in the end, Fate had won. Where was his childhood God when Willis had needed him yesterday? No. God didn’t exist. There was no God. What Supreme Being would allow what had befallen him and his family?

There is no God.

Willis was alone and knew it. He heard the next prisoner over shout for the jailer, still drunk and confused as to where he was. He too was lost.

        *   *   *

The falling snow was tinted blue by headlights as the sheriff deputy’s patrol car drove down the pre-dawn mountain road. The asphalt looked black and new, the falling snow mysterious as it blew onto the road. It seemed to Sheriff’s Deputy T.C. McCauley as if the two materials, asphalt and snow, were somehow meant to be together; to embrace, to resolve some riddle of nature and meet at last, snow rushing through space.

Out of nothingness, to nothingness, he thought.

Man’s fate was decided in winter, Deputy McCauley guessed, driving alone. He took a sip of 7-Eleven coffee he’d bought fifteen minutes before on highway 50, hot and tasteless. He was taking a Philosophy class at the junior college in Nevada City. The class had freed his imagination, giving him the confidence to plot an idea, for no other reason than because it came to him. The teacher had told the class of housewives, policeman, and shoe salesmen—all trying to better themselves—that every man was a philosopher.

It was winter that must have brought man to the high places, the deputy thought. It must have been a winter day when he ripped the skin from that first animal and wrapped its bloody, warm fur around his naked shoulders in the falling snow in some godforsaken forest. That day was our bright beginning, the first technology. Blood, fur, and guts would lead to all the rest of it—to this smartphone-wielding place. We, all of us, carry that day with us, stamped in the darkest part of our cerebellum—our wet computer chip. The dark code is written there, whether we like it or not. It is a very simple line of code: kill or be killed.

The deputy drove, one hand on the wheel, the radio turned low, its chatter a white noise, not unpleasant. He’d learned that truth long ago in Iraq—kill or be killed. He watched the dawn break with satisfaction, a dawn much different from the 710 dawns he’d seen over there. Those dust-red blood dawns were part of his past now, part of his personal diary, and he cherished them. The idea that he’d lived through all those nights—walks down the middle of hut-clad, IED-hiding, sudden-death roads—cheered him up now as it had every morning since he’d gotten back. Life was good. He had a wife he loved, two daughters and a son, a house he would never finish paying for! You had to be on the cusp of losing your life to remember that simple fact. You had to see the face of the slaughtered to remember it forever: Life, no matter how terrible, was better than death.

“Damn, take one class and you turn into a fucking preacher,” T.C. said out loud.

T.C. saw Sheriff Quentin Collier’s familiar white Jeep Cherokee coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. McCauley slowed his patrol car down and flashed his headlights. The two cars, bristling with antennae, pulled alongside one another. The deputy rolled down his window. Dawn was breaking, changing everything by the second, exposing the snow-bound pine forest around them.

“Quentin,” McCauley said. “You’re out early.” A white breath-vapor shot out of the deputy’s mouth from the cold as if he were some kind of engine. T.C. had a calm but tough countenance, reassuring in a lawman. His war experience showed in his eyes; their hooded quality seemed to reflect the savagery he’d witnessed and been forced to inflict on others. McCauley was only 27, but strangers he encountered on the job thought he was much older.