Driving through the night on the back roads of the Great
Plains the driver has never been so alone, with the radio on and the distant
lightning flashing as he passes through small towns strung out far apart in
silence but for his wheels on the unending roadway, silence of places where he
is amazed that people live, that lives go on here, in and of themselves completely
lived, that must in their ways be like his own, lived alone out here and there
in this house or that, familiar with all this that is strange enough to be on
another planet, it is easy to imagine this is another planet, as the earnest
preacher on the only clear station pleads with him at eighty miles an hour to
send in his money, no amount is too small, from the midst of that torrent of insects against the
windshield and receive a miracle APRON that will not only improve the TASTE of
the FOOD he COOKS but will bring those he FEEDS in his HUMILITY closer to BLOOD OF THE SAVIOR LORD GOD
JESUS CHRIST and CLEANSE his own SINNER’S BODY of
the work of the DEVIL and save the LOINS of the young and LUSTING, and the driver
feels even lonelier, pushes it to the floor to get somewhere, anywhere, or maybe
he'd prefer the BLESSED STEAM IRON, to be received by all the EXTRA-HOLY
CONTRIBUTORS to the SALVATION work of this reverend deejay who talks like god is
his good buddy as the car passes a little barely neon-lit bar way out in
central nowhere that calls to him with a woman in coveralls walking head-down
in the rising wind toward the only vehicle there, a battered pickup and he
feels the need of her life as he flashes by and it's impossible, where is she
going out here, where is he going, as the clouds draw close and unfurl their
lightning, their darker darkness and their rain that will soon fill the rivers
and obscure the road, the growing roar of the downpour drowning out even the
words of the preacher as the driver begins to sing to the vast drum of the sky
on the roof a song that began hundreds of thousands of years ago and he is no
longer alone, no longer going nowhere and has left no one behind, and he knows
like lightning that everything, except maybe that preacher, is god.
