Cold Fire

"You don't know?" "But I will when I get there.”

Father Geary stared at him for a long time. At last he said, "Jim, you're the strangest man I've ever known.”

Jim nodded. "I'm the strangest man I've ever known.”

When they set out from the rectory in the priest's six-year-old Toyota, an hour of light remained in the long August day, although the sun was hidden behind clouds the color of fresh bruises.

They had been on the road only half an hour when lightning shattered the bleak sky and danced on jagged legs across the somber desert horizon.

Flash after flash erupted, sharper and brighter in the pure Mojave air than Jim had ever seen lightning elsewhere. Ten minutes later, the sky grew darker and lower, and rain fell in silvery cataracts the equal of anything that Noah had witnessed while hurrying to complete his ark.

"Summer storms are rare here," Father Geary said, switching on the windshield wipers.

"We can't let it delay us," Jim said worriedly.

"I'll get you there," the priest assured him.

"There can't be that many flights east from Vegas at night. They'd mostly leave during the day. I can't miss out and wait till morning.

I've got to be in Boston tomorrow" The parched sand soaked up the deluge. But some areas were rocky or hard-packed from months of blistering sun, and in those places the water spilled off slopes, forming rivulets in every shallow declivity. Rivulets became streams, and streams grew swiftly into rivers, until every bridged arroyo they passed over was soon filled with roiling, churning torrents on which were borne clumps of uprooted desert bunch-grass, fragments of dead tumbleweed, driftwood, and dirty white foam.

Father Geary had two favorite cassette tapes, which he kept in the car: a collection of rock-'n'-roll golden oldies, and an Elton John best-of He put on Elton. They moved through the storm-hammered day then through the rainswept night to the melodies of "Funeral for a Friend," "Daniel," and "Benny and the Jets.”

The blacktop glimmered with quicksilver puddles. To Jim, it was eerie that the water mirages on the highway a few days ago had now become real.

He grew more tense by the minute. Boston called to him, but it was far away, and few things were darker or more treacherous than a blacktop highway through a storm-wracked desert at night. Unless, perhaps, the human heart.

The priest hunched over the wheel as he drove. He studied the highway intently while singing along softly with Elton.

After a while Jim said, "Father, wasn't there a doctor in town?" "Yes.”

"But you didn't call him.”

"I got the cortisone prescription from him.”

"I saw the tube. It was a prescription for you, made out three months ago.”

"Well. I've seen sunstroke before. I knew I could treat you.”

"But you seemed awfully worried there at first.”

The priest was silent for a few miles. Then he said, "I don't know who you are, where you come from, or why you really need to get to Boston.

But I do know you're a man in trouble, maybe deep trouble, as deep as it ever gets. And I know. at least, I think I know that you're a good man at heart. Anyway, it seemed to me that a man in trouble would want to keep a low profile.”

"Thanks. I do.”

A couple of miles farther, the rain came down hard enough to overwhelm the windshield wipers and force Geary to reduce speed.

The priest said, "You're the one who saved that woman and her little girl.”

Jim tensed but did not respond.

"You fit the description on TV," the priest said.

They were silent for a few more miles.

Father Geary said, "I'm not a sucker for miracles.”

Jim was baffled by that statement.

Father Geary switched off Elton John. The only sounds were the swish bum of the tires on the wet pavement and the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers.

"I believe that the miracles of the Bible happened, yes, I accept all of that as real history," the priest said, keeping his eyes on the road.

"But I'm reluctant to believe that some statue of the Holy Mother wept real tears in a church in Cincinnati or Peoria or Teaneck last week after the Wednesday-night bingo games, witnessed only by two teenagers and the parish cleaning lady. And I'm not ready to believe that a shadow resembling Jesus, cast on someone's garage wall by a yellow bug light, is a sign of impending apocalypse. God works in mysterious ways, but not with bug lights and garage walls.”

The priest fell silent again, and Jim waited, wondering where all this was leading.

"When I found you in the church, lying by the sanctuary railing," Geary said in a voice that grew more haunted word by word, "you were marked by the stigmata of Christ. There was a nail hole in each of your hands-" Jim looked at his hands and saw no wounds.

"— and your forehead was scratched and prickled with what might have been punctures from a crown of thorns.”

His face was still such a mess from the punishment of sun and wind that it was no use searching in the rearview mirror for the minor injuries the priest had described.