Ministers of Fire by Mark Harril Saunders

Author:Mark Harril Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

The sun fell from its zenith in the white sky behind them as Lindstrom walked to a cadence on the tufted grass track behind Yong. The path had been swinging gradually south for an hour, and now the molten ball hung like a yolk above the rooftops of the town. In the paddy, zephyrs pooled the bright grass. Lindstrom tried closing his eyes, but the dying sun burned at his cheek, and he saw it through his eyelids: Refinery fire. Fuller’s soap. You can’t banish this God from your mind. He’s in the forest, the vineyards, on the docks, in the paddies, the village, the town. There’s no hiding, Johnny Lindstrom. You’re His child.

He marched nearly asleep, as he had in Vietnam, night thoughts coming to greet him. He and Yong were both impostors, he thought, inauthentic, disciples of everything and nothing at all. Because that’s how it goes: you reject a creed and pretty soon you’re an agent of nothing, of death. You look for adventure, and adventure grabs hold of you. He tried summoning the hope he’d felt reading Yong’s notebook, grace afforded by big thoughts, but it had shrunken out of reach, a pebble deep inside him, only worrying his soul. He thought of asking Yong about the weapons he’d worked on, but instinct told him that was one conversation he should save, no matter what the conclusion.

“That sun,” he said. The handle of the briefcase was slipping absurdly from his hand, and he put it down, stopping to retie his shoe and to check their surroundings.

“It will be down soon,” Yong said.

Lindstrom shivered in spite of the lingering warmth. The .45 was cocked and locked in the briefcase, the path before and behind them was clear. The meth was tempting, but he held it off for the moment. At a distance he judged to be just over five hundred yards, the track they were on joined a road. The road abutted a factory on the southeastern corner of the town and cut in a straight line across the paddy. Another mile and it came abreast of a railbed, raised above the paddy on a flat bed of gravel and grass. The rails gleamed dully in the lowering light. “Who uses that road?”

“Teacher Chen said there’s the station.” Yong’s tone was as calm as the air crouching over the field. A buffalo dragged a stooped farmer on a changeless and lumbering progress across it. Something about the buffalo, its quaintness or futility or its absolute refusal to be anything more than it was, made Lindstrom want to shoot it in the head.

“I hate this countryside,” he said.

“The militia has a camp in the fields beyond the station,” Yong told him, removing his jacket. The T-shirt underneath was stenciled with a waving giant panda, a ridiculous remnant of some international event of goodwill.

“Come on,” said Lindstrom. The light had dipped, spread; the creased, purple mountains came out in relief. What light remained clung to the corduroy surface of the road.

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