Mr. Hargison stood at the edge of the hole and peered down. "That's the bomb right there, is it?"

"No, it's a big goose t.u.r.d!" Mr. Moultry raged. "'Course it's the bomb!"

While Mr. Moultry thrashed to get free again and only succeeded in raising a storm of plaster dust and causing himself considerable pain, Dad looked around the bas.e.m.e.nt. Over in one corner was a desk, and above it a wall plaque that read A MAN'S HOME IS HIS CASTLE. Next to it was a poster of a bug-eyed black minstrel tap-dancing, and underneath it the hand-lettered sign THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN. Dad wandered over to the desk, the top of which was six inches deep in untidy papers. He slid open the upper drawer and was. .h.i.t in the face by the enormous mammary glands of a woman on a Juggs magazine cover. Underneath the magazine was a hodgepodge of Gem clips, pencils, rubber bands, and the like. An overexposed Kodak picture came to hand. It showed d.i.c.k Moultry wearing a white robe and cradling in one arm a rifle while the other embraced a peaked white cap and hood. Mr. Moultry was smiling broadly, proud of his accomplishments.

"Hey, get outta there!" Mr. Moultry swiveled his head around. "It ain't enough I'm layin' here dyin', you've gotta ransack my house, too?"

Dad closed the drawer on the picture and walked back to Sheriff Marchette. Above them, Mr. Hargison nervously scuffed his soles on the warped floor. "Listen, d.i.c.k, I just wanted to come by and see about you. Make sure you weren't... you know, dead and all."

"No, I'm not dead yet. Much as my wife wishes that bomb had clunked me right on the brainpan."

"We're headin' out of town," Mr. Hargison explained. "Uh... we probably won't be back until day after Christmas. Probably get back near ten o'clock in the mornin'. Hear me, d.i.c.k? Ten o'clock in the mornin'."

"Yeah, I hear you! I don't care what time you get back!"

"Well, we'll get back near ten o'clock. In the mornin', day after Christmas. Thought you might want to know, so you could set your watch."

"Set my watch? Are you-" He stopped. "Oh. Yeah. Okay, I'll do that." He grinned, his face sweating as he looked up at the sheriff. "Gerald and me are supposed to help a friend clean out his garage day after Christmas. That's why he's tellin' me what time he'll be back."

"Is that so?" the sheriff asked. "What friend might that be, d.i.c.k?"

"Oh... fella lives in Union Town. You wouldn't know him."

"I know a lot of people in Union Town. What's your friend's name?"

"Joe," Mr. Hargison said, at the exact second Mr. Moultry said, "Sam."

"Joe Sam," Mr. Moultry explained, still sweatily grinning. "Joe Sam Jones."

"I don't think you're gonna be helping any Joe Sam Jones clean out his garage the day after Christmas, d.i.c.k. I think you'll be in a nice secure hospital room, don't you?"

"Hey, d.i.c.k, I'm headin' off!" Mr. Hargison announced. "Don't you worry, you're gonna be just fine." And with that last word the toe of his left shoe nudged the silver Christmas tree star that lay balanced on the hole's ragged edge. Dad watched the little star fall as if in graceful slow motion, like a magnified snowflake drifting down.

It hit one of the bomb's iron-gray tail fins, and exploded in a shower of painted gla.s.s.

In the seconds of silence that followed, all four of the men heard it.

The bomb made a hissing sound, like a serpent that had been awakened in its nest. The hissing faded, and from the bomb's guts there came a slow, ominous ticking: not like the ticking of an alarm clock, but rather the ticking of a hot engine building up to a boil.

"Oh... s.h.i.t," Sheriff Marchette whispered.

"Jesus save me!" Mr. Moultry gasped. His face, which had been flushed crimson a few moments before, now became as white as a wax dummy.

"The thing's switched on," Dad said, his voice choked.

Mr. Hargison's speech was by far the most eloquent. He spoke with his legs, which propelled him across the warped floor, out onto the crooked porch and to his car at the curb as if he'd been boomed from a cannon. The car sped away like the Road Runner: one second there, the next not.

"Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d!" Tears had sprung to Mr. Moultry's eyes. "Don't let me die!"

"Tom? I believe it's time." Sheriff Marchette was speaking softly, as if the weight of words pa.s.sing through the air might be enough to cause concussion. "To vamoose, don't you?"

"You can't leave me! You can't! You're the sheriff!"

"I can't do anythin' more for you, d.i.c.k. I swear I wish I could, but I can't. Seems to me you need magic or a miracle right about now, and I think the well's run dry."

"Don't leave me! Get me out of this, Jack! I'll pay you whatever you want!"

"I'm sorry. Climb on up, Tom."

Dad didn't have to be told a second time. He scaled that ladder like Lucifer up a tree. At the top, he said, "I'll steady the ladder for you, Jack! Come on!"

The bomb ticked. And ticked. And ticked.

"I can't help you, d.i.c.k," Sheriff Marchette said, and he climbed the ladder.

"No! Listen! I'll do anythin'! Get me out, okay? I won't mind if it hurts! Okay?"

Dad and Sheriff Marchette were on their way to the door.

"Please!" Mr. Moultry shouted. His voice cracked, and a sob came out. He fought against his trap, but the pain made him cry harder. " You can't leave me to die! It's not human!"

He was still shouting and sobbing as Dad and the sheriff left the house. Both their faces were drawn and tight. "Great job this turned out to be," Sheriff Marchette said. "Jesus." They reached the sheriff's car. "You need a ride somewhere, Tom?"

"Yeah." He frowned. "No." And he leaned against the car. "I don't know."

"Now, don't look like that! There's not a thing can be done for him, and you know it!"

"Maybe somebody ought to wait around, in case the bomb squad shows up."

"Fine." The sheriff glanced up and down the deserted street. "Are you volunteerin'?"

"No."

"Me, neither! And they're not gonna show up anytime soon, Tom. I think that bomb's gonna explode and we'll lose this whole block, and I don't know about you, but I'm gettin' out while I've still got my skin." He walked around to the driver's door.

"Jack, wait a minute," Dad said.

"Ain't got a minute. Come on, if you're comin'."

Dad got into the car with him, and Sheriff Marchette started the engine. "Where to?"

"Listen to me, Jack. You said it yourself: d.i.c.k needs magic or a miracle, right? So who's the one person around here who might be able to give it to him?"

"Reverend Blessett's left town."

"No, not him! Her."

Sheriff Marchette paused with his hand on the gearshift.

"Anybody who can turn a bag of shotgun sh.e.l.ls into a bag of garden snakes might be able to take care of a bomb, don't you think?"

"No, I don't! I don't think the Lady had a thing to do with that. I think Biggun Blaylock was so blasted out of his mind on his own rotgut whiskey that he thought he was fillin' that ammo bag full of cartridges when all the time he was shovelin' the snakes in!"

"Oh, come on! You saw those snakes the same as I did! There were hundreds of 'em! How long would it have taken Biggun to find 'em all?"

"I don't believe in that voodoo stuff," Sheriff Marchette said. "Not one bit."

Dad said the first thing that came to mind, and saying it left a shocked taste in his mouth: "We can't be afraid to ask her for help, Jack. She's all we've got."

"d.a.m.n," the sheriff muttered. "d.a.m.n and double-d.a.m.n." He looked at the Moultry house, light rising from its broken roof. "She might be gone by now."

"She might be. She might not be. Can't we at least drive over there and find out?"

Many houses in Bruton were dark, their owners having obeyed the siren and fled the impending blast. Her rainbow-hued dwelling, however, was all lit up. Tiny sparkling lights blinked in the windows.

"I'll wait right here," Sheriff Marchette said. Dad nodded and got out. He took a deep breath of Christmas Eve air and made his legs move. They carried him to the front door. He took the door's knocker, a little silver hand, and did something he never dreamed he would've done in a million years: he announced to the Lady that he had come to call.

He waited, hoping she would answer.

He waited, watching the doork.n.o.b.

He waited.

Fifteen minutes after my father took the silver hand, there was a noise on the street where d.i.c.k Moultry lived. It was a rumble and a clatter, a clanking and a clinking, and it caused the dogs to bark in its wake. The rust-splotched, suspension-sagging pickup truck stopped at the curb in front of the Moultry house, and a long, skinny black man got out of the driver's door. On that door was stenciled, not very neatly: LIGHTFOOT'S FIX-IT.

He moved so slowly it seemed that movement might be a painful process. He wore freshly washed overalls and a gray cap that allowed his gray hair to boil out from beneath it. In supreme slow motion, he walked to the truck's bed and strapped on his tool belt, which held several different kinds of hammers, screwdrivers, and arcane-looking wrenches. In a slow extension of time he picked up his toolbox, an old metal fascination filled with drawers that held every kind of nut and bolt under the workman's sun. Then, as if moving under the burden of the ages, Mr. Marcus Lightfoot walked to d.i.c.k Moultry's crooked entrance. He knocked at the door, even though it stood wide open: One... two...

Eternities pa.s.sed. Civilizations thrived and crumbled. Stars were born in brawny violence and died doddering in the cold vault of the cosmos.

...three.

"Thank G.o.d!" Mr. Moultry shouted, his voice worn to a frazzle. "I knew you wouldn't let me die, Jack! Oh, G.o.d have mer-" He stopped shouting in mid-praise, because he was looking up through the hole in the living room's floor, and instead of help from heaven he saw the black face of what he considered a devil of the earth.

"Lawdy, lawdy," Mr. Lightfoot said. His eyes had found the bomb, his ear the ticking of its detonation mechanism. "You sure in a big pile'a mess."

"Have you come to watch me get blown up, you black savage?" Mr. Moultry snarled.

"Nossuh. Come ta keep you from gettin' blowed."

"You? Help me? Hah!" He pulled in a breath and roared through his ravaged throat: " Jack! Somebody help me! Anybody white!"

"Mr. Moultry, suh?" Mr. Lightfoot waited for the other man's lungs to give out. "That there b.u.mb might not care for such a' noise."

Mr. Moultry, his face the color of ketchup and the sweat standing up in beads, began fighting his condition. He thrashed and clawed at the pile of debris; he grasped at his own shirt in a fit of rage and ripped the rest of it away; he gripped at the very air but found no handholds there. And then the pain crashed over him like one wrestler bodyslamming another and Mr. Moultry was left gasping and breathless but still with two broken legs and a bomb ticking next to his head.

"I believe," Mr. Lightfoot said, and he yawned at the lateness of the hour, "I'd best come on down."

It might have been New Year's Eve before Mr. Lightfoot reached the bottom of the stepladder, the tools in his belt jingling together. He grasped his toolbox and started toward Mr. Moultry, but the poster of the bug-eyed minstrel on the wall caught his attention. He stared at it as the seconds and the bomb ticked.

"Heh-heh," Mr. Lightfoot said, and shook his head. "Heh heh."

"What're you laughin' at, you crazy jigaboo?"

"Tha.s.s a white man," he said. "All painted up and lookin' the fool."

At last Mr. Lightfoot pulled himself away from the picture of Al Jolson and went to the bomb. He cleared away some nail-studded timbers and roof shingles and sat down on the red dirt, a process that was like watching a snail cross a football field. He drew the toolbox close to his side, like a trusted companion. Then he took a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his shirt, blew on the lenses, and wiped them on his sleeve, all at excruciating slowness.

"What have I done to deserve this?" Mr. Moultry croaked.

Mr. Lightfoot got his spectacles on. "Now," he said. "I can." He leaned closer to the bomb, and as he frowned the small lines deepened between his eyes. "See what's what."

He took a hammer with a miniature head from his belt. He licked his thumb and-slowly, slowly-marked the hammer's head with his spit. Then he tapped the bomb's side so lightly it hardly made a noise.

"Don't hit it! Oh Jeeeeesus! You'll blow us both to h.e.l.l!"

"Ain't," Mr. Lightfoot replied as he made small tappings up and down the bomb's side, "plannin' on it." He pressed his ear against the bomb's iron skin. "Uh-huh," he said. "I hears you talkin'." As Mr. Moultry agonized in terrified silence, Mr. Lightfoot's fingers were at work, moving across the bomb as one might stroke a small dog. "Uh-huh." His fingers stopped on a thin seam. "Tha.s.s the way ta your heart, ain't it?" He located four screws just below the tail fins, and he lifted the proper screwdriver from its place on his belt like a glacier melting.

"You came here to kill me, didn't you?" Mr. Moultry groaned. He received a punch of insight. "She sent you, didn't she? She sent you to kill me!"

"Got," Mr. Lightfoot said as he made the first turn of the first screw, "half that right."

Eons later, the final screw fell into Mr. Lightfoot's palm. Mr. Lightfoot had started humming "Frosty, the Snowman," in his somnolent way. Sometime between the removal of the second and third screws, the sound of the detonation mechanism had changed from a tick to a rasp. Mr. Moultry, lying in a stew of sweat, his eyes gla.s.sy and his head thrashing back and forth with dementia, had lost five pounds.

Mr. Lightfoot took from his toolbox a small blue jar. He opened it and with the tip of his index finger withdrew some greasy gunk the color of eel's skin. He spat into it, and smeared the gunk onto the seam that circled the bomb. Then he took hold of the tail fins and tried to give them a counterclockwise turn. They resisted. He tried it in the clockwise direction, but that, too, was fruitless.

"Listen here!" Mr. Lightfoot's voice was stern, his brow furrowed with disapproval. "Don't you gimme no sa.s.s!" With the miniature hammer he clunked the screw holes, and Mr. Moultry lost another few ounces as his pants suddenly got wet. Then Mr. Lightfoot gripped the tail fins with both hands and pulled.

Slowly, with a thin high skrreeeeek of resistance, the bomb's tail section began to slide out. It was hard work, and Mr. Lightfoot had to pause to stretch his cramping fingers. Then he went back to it, with the determination of a sloth gripping a tree branch. At last the tail section came free, and exposed were electronic circuits, a jungle of different-colored wires, and shiny black plastic cylinders that resembled the backs of roaches.

"Hoooowheeee!" Mr. Lightfoot breathed, enchanted. "Ain't it pretty?"

"Killin' me..." Mr. Moultry moaned. "Killin' me dead..."

The rasping was louder. Mr. Lightfoot used a metal probe to touch a small red box from which the noise emanated. Then he used his finger, and he whistled as he drew the finger back. "Oh-oh," he said. "Gettin' kinda warm."

Mr. Moultry began to blubber, his nose running and the tears trickling from his swollen eyes.

Mr. Lightfoot's fingers were at work again, tracing the wires to their points of origin. The smell of heat rose into the air, which shimmered over the red box. Mr. Lightfoot scratched his chin. "Y'know," he said, "I believe we gots us a problem here."

Mr. Moultry trembled on the edge of coma.

"See, I"-Mr. Lightfoot tapped his chin, his eyes narrowed with concentration-"fix things. I don't break 'em." He drew in a long breath and slowly released it. "Gone have ta do a little breakin', seems ta me." He nodded. "Yessuh. Sure do hate ta break somethin' so pretty." He chose another, larger hammer. "Gone have ta do it." He cracked the hammer down on the red box. Its plastic skin split from one end to the other. Mr. Moultry's teeth gripped his tongue. Mr. Lightfoot removed the two plastic sections and regarded the smaller workings and wires within. "Jus' mysteries in mysteries," he said. He put his hand down into the toolbox and it came out holding a little wire cutter that still had its ninety-nine-cent price sticker on it. "Now, listen good," he told the bomb, "don't you burp in my face, hear?"

"Ohhhhh G.o.d, oh Jeeeesus above, oh I'm comin' to heaven, I'm comin'," Mr. Moultry gasped.

"You get there," Mr. Lightfoot said with a faint smile, "you tell St. Peter he's got a fix-it-man on the way." He reached the cutter toward two wires-one black, the other white-that crisscrossed at the heart of the machine.

"Wait," Mr. Moultry whispered. "Wait..."