Then one day the TV cameras came, and the movie cameras, and set up on the lawn and in the street outside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” demanded Billy’s Mother.

  “Bucky Fay’s coming to meet the crippled Healer,” said the movie man. “We want to have this for Bucky Fay’s show.”

  “If you try to bring one little camera inside our house I’ll have the police on you.”

  “The public’s got a right to know,” said the man, pointing the camera at her.

  “The public’s got a right to kiss my ass,” said Mother, and she went back into the house and told everybody to go away and come back tomorrow, they were locking up the house for the day.

  Mother and Billy watched through the lacy curtains while Bucky Fay got out of his limousine and waved at the cameras and the people crowded around in the street.

  “Don’t let him in, Mother,” said Billy.

  Bucky Fay knocked on the door.

  “Don’t answer,” said Billy.

  Bucky Fay knocked and knocked. Then he gestured to the cameramen and they all went back to their vans and all of Bucky Fay’s helpers went back to their cars and the police held the crowd far away, and Bucky Fay started talking.

  “Billy,” said Bucky Fay, “I don’t aim to hurt you. You’re a true healer, I just want to shake your hand.”

  “Don’t let him touch me again,” said Billy. Mother shook her head.

  “If you let me help you, you can heal hundreds and hundreds more people, all around the world, and bring millions of TV viewers to Jesus.”

  “The boy don’t want you,” Mother said.

  “Why are you afraid of me? I didn’t give you your gift, God did.”

  “Go away!” Billy shouted.

  There was silence for a moment outside the door. Then Bucky Fay’s voice came again, softer, and it sounded like he was holding back a sob. “Billy, why do you think I come to you? I am the worst son-of-a-bitch I know, and I come for you to heal me.”

  That was not a thing that Billy had ever thought to hear from Bucky Fay.

  Bucky Fay was talking soft now, so it was sometimes hard to understand him. “In the name of Jesus, boy, do you think I woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘Bucky Fay, go out and be a healer and you’ll get rich’ ? Think I said that? No sir. I had a gift once. Like yours, I had a gift. I found it one day when I was swimming at the water hole with my big brother Jeddy. Jeddy, he was a show-off, he was always tempting Death to come for him, and that day he dove right down from the highest branch and plunked his head smack in the softest, stickiest mud on the bottom of Pachuckamunkey River. Took fifteen minutes just to get his head loose. They brought him to shore and he was dead, his face all covered with mud. And I screamed and cried out loud, ‘God, you ain’t got no right!’ and then I touched my brother, and smacked him on the head, I said, ‘God damn you, Jeddy, you pin-headed jackass, you ain’t dead, get up and walk!’ And that was when I discovered I had the gift. Because Jeddy reached up and wiped the mud off his eyes and rolled over and puked the black Pachukey water all over grass there. ‘Thank you Jesus,’ I said. In those days I could lay hands on mules with bent legs and they’d go straight. A baby with measles, and his spots would go. I had a good heart then. I healed colored people, and in those days even the doctors wouldn’t go so far as that. But then they offered me money, and I took it, and they asked me to preach even though I didn’t know a damn thing, and so I preached, and pretty soon I found myself in a jet airplane that I owned flying over a airstrip that I owned heading for a TV station that I owned and I said to myself, Bucky Fay, you haven’t healed a soul in twenty years. A few folks have gotten better because of their own faith, but you lost the gift. You threw it away for the sake of money.” On the other side of the door Bucky Fay wailed in anguish. “Oh, God in heaven, let me in this door or I will die!”

  Billy nodded, tears in his eyes, and Mother opened the door. Bucky Fay was on his knees leaning against the door so he nearly fell into the room. He didn’t even stand up to walk over to Billy, just crawled most of the way and then said, “Billy, the light of God is in your eyes. Heal me of my affliction! My disease is love of money! My disease is forgetting the Lord God of heaven! Heal me and let me have my gift back again, and I will never stray, not ever so long as I live!”

  Billy reached out his hand. Slow and trembling, Bucky Fay gently took that hand and kissed it, and touched it to the tears hot and wet on his cheeks. “You have given me,” he said, “you have given me this day a gift that I never thought to have again. I am whole!” He got up, kissed Billy on both cheeks, then stepped back. “Oh, my child, I will pray for you. With all my heart I will pray that God will remove your paralysis from your legs. For I believe he gave you your paralysis to teach you compassion for the cripple, just as he gave me temptation to teach me compassion for the sinner. God bless you, Billy, Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah,” said Billy softly. He was crying too—couldn’t help it, he felt so good. He had longed for vengeance, and instead he had forgiven, and he felt holy.

  That is, until he realized that the TV cameras had come in right behind Bucky Fay, and were taking a close-up of Billy’s tear-stained face, of Mother wringing her hands and weeping. Bucky Fay walked out the door, his clenched fist high above his head, and the crowd outside greeted him with a cheer. “Hallelujah!” shouted Bucky. “Jesus had made me whole!”

  It played real well on the religious station. Bucky Fay’s repentance—oh, how the crowds in the studio audience gasped at his confession. How the people wept at the moment when Billy reached out his hand. It was a fine show. And at the end, Bucky Fay wept again. “Oh, my friends who have trusted me, you have seen the mighty change in my heart. From now on I will wear the one suit that you see me wearing now. I have forsaken my diamond cuff links and my Lear jet and my golf course in Louisiana. I am so ashamed of what I was before God healed me with the hands of that little crippled boy. I tell all of you—send me no more money! Don’t send me a single dime to post office box eight three nine, Christian City, Louisiana 70539. I am not fit to have your money. Contribute your tithes and offerings to worthier men than I. Send me nothing!—

  Then he knelt and bowed his head for a moment, and then looked up again, out into the audience, into the cameras, tears flowing down his face. “Unless. Unless you forgive me. Unless you believe that Jesus has changed me before your very eyes.”

  Mother switched off the TV savagely.

  “After seeing all those other people get better,” Billy whispered. “I thought he might’ve gotten better, too.”

  Mother shook her head and looked away. “What he got isn’t a disease.” Then she bent over the wheelchair and hugged him. “I feel so bad, Billy!”

  “I don’t feel bad,” Billy said. “Jesus cured the blind people and the deaf people and the crippled people and the lepers. But as far as I remember, the Bible don’t say he ever cured even one son-of-a-bitch.”

  She was still hugging him, which he didn’t mind even though he near smothered in her bosom. Now she chuckled. It was all right, if Mother chuckled about it. “Guess you’re right about that,” Mother said. “Even Jesus did no better.”

  For a while they had a rest, because the people who believed went to Bucky Fay and the doubters figured that Billy was no better. The newspaper and TV people stopped coming around, too, because Billy never put on a show for them and never said anything that people would pay money to read. Then, after a while, the sick people started coming back, just a few a week at first, and then more and more. They were uncertain, skeptical. They hadn’t heard of Billy on TV lately, hadn’t read about him either, and he lived in such a poor neighborhood, with no signs or anything.

  More than once a car with out-of-state plates drove back and forth in front of the house before it stopped and someone came in. The ones who came were those who had lost all other hope, who were willing to try anything, even something as unlikely as this. They had heard a rumor, someone had a cousin whose best friend was healed. They always felt like such damn fools visiting this crippled kid, but it was better than sitting home waiting for death.

  So they came, more and more of them. Mother had to quit her job again. All day Billy waited in his bedroom for them to come in. They always looked so distant, guarding themselves against another disillusionment. Billy, too, was afraid, waiting for the day when someone would place a baby in his arms and the child would die, the healing power gone out of him. But it didn’t happen, day after day it didn’t happen, and the people kept coming fearful and departing in joy.

  Mother and Billy lived pretty poorly, since they only took money that came from gratitude instead of money meant to buy. But Billy had a decent life, if you don’t mind being paralyzed and stuck home all the time, and Mother didn’t mind too much either, since there was always the sight of the blind seeing and the crippled walking and those withered-up children coming out whole and strong.

  Then one day after quite a few years there came a young woman who wasn’t sick. She was healthy and tall and nice-looking, in a kitcheny kind of way. She had rolled-up sleeves and hands that looked like they’d met dishwater before, and she walked right into the house and said, “Make room, I’m moving in.”

  “Now, girl,” said Mother, “we got a small house and no room to put you up. I think you got the wrong idea of what kind of Christian charity we offer here.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I know just what you do. Because I am the little girl who touched Billy that day by the riverside and started all your misery.”

  “Now, girl, you know that didn’t start our misery.”

  “I’ve never forgotten. I grew up and went through two husbands and had no children and no memory of real love except for what I saw in the face of a crippled boy at the riverside, and I thought, ‘He needs me, and I need him.’ So here I am, I’m here to help, tell me what to do and step aside.”

  Her name was Madeleine and she stayed from then on. She wasn’t noisy and she wasn’t bossy, she just worked her share and got along. It was hard to know for sure why it was so, but with Madeleine there, even with no money and no legs, Billy’s life was good. They sang a lot of songs, Mother and Billy and Madeleine, sang and played games and talked about a lot of things, when the visitors gave them time. And only once in all those years did Madeleine ever talk to Billy about religion. And then it was just a question.

  “Billy,” asked Madeleine, “are you God?”

  Billy shook his head. “God ain’t no cripple.”

  West

  It was a good scavenging trip eastward to the coast that summer, and Jamie Teague had a pack full of stuff before he even got to Marine City. Things were peaceful there, and he might have stayed, he was that welcome. But along about the start of August, Jamie said his good-byes and headed back west. Had to reach the mountains before the snows came.

  He made fair time on his return trip. It was only September, he was already just west of Winston—but Jamie was so hungry that kudzu was starting to look like salad to him.

  Not that hunger was anything new. Every time he took this months-long trip from his cabin in the Great Smokies to the coast and back, there were days here and there with nothing to eat. Jamie was a champion scavenger, but most houses and all the old grocery stores had their food cleaned out long since. Besides, what good was it to scavenge food? Any canned stuff you found nowadays was likely to be bad. What Jamie looked for was metal stuff folks didn’t make no more. Hammers. Needles. Nails. Saws. One time he found this little out-of-the-way hardware store near Checowinity that had a whole crate of screws, a good size, too, and not a speck of rust. Near killed him carrying the whole mess of it back, but he couldn’t leave any; he didn’t get to the coast that often, and somebody was bound to find anything he left behind.

  This trip hadn’t been as good as that time, but it was still good, considering most of the country was pretty well picked over by now. He found him some needles. Two fishing reels and a dozen spools of resilient line. A lot of ordinary stuff, besides. And things he couldn’t put in his pack: that long visit in Marine City on the coast; them nice folks north of Kenansville who took him in and listened to his tales. The Kenansville folks even invited him to stay with them, and fed him near to busting on country ham and sausage biscuits in the cool of those hot August mornings. But Jamie Teague knew what came of staying around the same folks too long, and so he pushed on. Now the memory of those meals made him feel all wishful, here on fringe of Winston, near three days without eating.

  He’d been hungry lots of times before, and he’d get hungry lots of times again, but that didn’t mean it didn’t matter to him. That didn’t mean he didn’t get kind of faint along about midday. That didn’t mean he couldn’t get himself up a tree and just sit there, resting, looking down onto I-40 and listening to the birds bullshitting each other about how it was a fine day, twitter twit, a real fine day.

  Tomorrow there’d be plenty to eat. Tomorrow he’d be west of Winston and into wild country, where he could kill him a squirrel with a stone’s throw. There just wasn’t much to eat these days in the country he just walked through, between Greensboro and Winston. Seems like everybody who ever owned a gun or a slingshot had gone out killing squirrels and possums and rabbits till there wasn’t a one left.

  That was one of the problems with this part of Carolina still being civilized with a government and all. Near half the people were still alive, probably. That meant maybe a quarter million in Guilford and Forsyth counties. No way could such a crowd keep themselves in meat just on what they could farm nearby, not without gasoline for the tractors and fertilizer for the fields.

  Greensboro and Winston didn’t know they were doomed, not yet. They still thought they were the lucky ones, missing most of the ugliness that just tore apart all the big cities and left whole states nothing but wasteland. But Jamie Teague had been a ways northward in his travels, and heard stories from even farther north, and what he learned was this: After the bleeding was over, the survivors had land and tools enough to feed themselves. There was a life, if they could fend off the vagabonds and mobbers, and if the winter didn’t kill them, and if they didn’t get one of them diseases that was still mutating themselves here and there, and if they wasn’t too close to a place where one of the bombs hit. There was enough. They could live.

  Here, though, there just wasn’t enough. The trees that once made this country beautiful were going fast, cut up for firewood, and bit by bit the folks here were either going to freeze or starve or kill each other off till the population was down. Things would get pretty ugly.

  From some stories he heard, Jamie figured things were getting pretty ugly already.

  Which is why he skirted his way around Greensboro to the north, keeping his eyes peeled so he saw most folks before they saw him. No, he saw everybody before they saw him, and made sure they never saw him at all. That’s how a body stayed alive these days. Especially a traveling man, a walking man like him. In some places, being a stranger nowadays was the same as having a death sentence from which you might get an appeal but probably not. Being invisible except when he wanted to be seen had kept Jamie alive right through the worst times of the last five years, the whole world going to hell. He’d learned to walk through the woods so quiet he could pretty near pet the squirrels; and he was so good with throwing rocks that he never fired his rifle at all, not for food, anyway. A rock was all he needed for possum, coon, rabbit, squirrel, or porcupine, and anything bigger would be more meat than he could carry. A walking man can’t take a deer along, and he can’t stay in one place long enough to smoke it or jerk it or salt it or nothing. So Jamie just didn’t look for bigger game. A squirrel was meat enough for him. Wild berries and untended orchards and canned goods in abandoned houses did for the rest of his diet on the road.

  Most of all a walking man can’t afford to get lonely. You start to feeling like you just got to talk to some human face or you’re going to bust, and then what happens? You greet some stranger and he blows your head off. You put in with some woodsy family and they slit your throat in the night and make spoons out of your bones and leather bags out of your skin and your muscle ends up in the smokehouse getting its final cure. It led to no good, wishing for company, so Jamie never did.

  That’s why he was setting by himself in a tree over the chain-link fence that marked the border of I-40 when he heard some folks singing, so loud he could hear them before he saw them. Singing, if you can believe it, right on the road, right on the freeway, which is the same as to say they were out of their minds. The idea of making noise while traveling on I-40 was so brazen that Jamie first thought they must be mobbers. But no, Winston and Greensboro had a right smart highway patrol on horseback, and these folks was coming from Winston heading west—no way could they be mobbers. They was just too dumb to live, that’s all, normal citizens, refugees or something, people who still thought the world was safe for singing in.

  When they came into sight, they were as weird a group as Jamie’d seen since the plague started. Right up front walked a big fat white woman looking like silage in a tent, and she was leading the others in some song. Two men, one white and one black, were each pulling wagons made of bicycles framed together with two-by-fours, loaded with stuff and covered with tarps. There was two black girls about eighteen maybe, and a blond white woman about thirty-five, and a half-dozen little white kids. Looked like a poster pleading for racial unity from back before the plague.

  These days you just didn’t see blacks and whites together much. People looked out for their own. There wasn’t a lot of race hatred, they just didn’t have much to do with each other. Like Marine City, where Jamie was just coming back from. There was black Marine City and white Marine City. They all pretended to be part of the same town, but they had separate police and separate courts and you just didn’t go into the other folks’ part of town. You just didn’t. It was pretty much that way anywhere Jamie went.