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Show Blue Run/69 how it was new after all these miles One of those ripcords in time that sticks, you know you've been moving toward it all along, and then it's there, right in front of your face. In the big square rearview, the driver's face went white. "Honey," this lady, my new friend, said. "It ain't me " The driver kept his mouth shut after that, so me and the boys were driven from Alma down through Clarksville and Morrilton where the Stepwell family cemetery overlooks a pasture with a lightning struck tree. We had hours to wonder, imagine skin burning, as if Juanita back in California had somehow got into the future and burned O.W. with her fire But there he was, O.W., at the terminal. He held onto me for a long time under a sign that advertised Good Times, Tulsa. And the next day and the next we sifted ashes with window screens borrowed from neighbors two pastures down. He'd escaped wearing only his underwear, one coal falling from the ceiling onto his chest, just above his heart, searing the hole that woke him and saved him before the ceiling collapsed. He had walked out of the burning house in his skivvies, started my ragged convertible and pulled onto Arch Street Pike, not knowing where to go or what to do. A grown man in underwear, driving through stoplights with a hole burned into his chest. His family off in California with a burned up woman who parlayed poison his way That was O.W- for him, fire's no friend. We sifted our ashes and moved on. To Lonoke this time, a small town some thirty miles north and east of Little Rock. We got Jesus there at the First Baptist Church where Brother Dellwood Walker pushed my head down into the cold baptismal: what is it about all our lives men pushing our heads down? He wore duck hunting waders under the white robe. I could see the little hexes on the floor from his bootsoles and thought of Daddy, all the great lost world-the |