Tom Bodett’s folksy voice oozed through the dashboard speakers. We’ll leave the light on for you. It floated across the red clay dirt before the radio cut out in a static death rattle.

My Ford Focus said, “Hold my beer.” It wheezed, giving up the ghost on the shoulder. Engine dead. 200,000 miles. No surprise. What a little bitch.

I spat on the gravel, watching the dust settle over my boots. Motel 6. Leave the fucking light on. Yeah, right. Nobody was home. My old man saw to it. He snuffed out every light in my world twenty-seven years ago. Now I was stuck in a 110-degree Texas inferno, boiling alive from the balls up. Damn. There went my plan.

After an hour of the sun beating down on me, a brown Impala pulled up. The driver—a sack of bones—leaned out the window. “Hey, you need a ride?”

I nodded and climbed inside, giving him the once-over. Dude was pasty, yellow from head to toe. He had those creepy-as-hell Steve Buscemi eyes. The car reeked of bleach. Probably to cover up the stench of his decapitated mother molting in the trunk.

He smiled. Rotten brown pegs. Meth teeth, all right. I wondered how the guy even ate.

“I hope you don’t mind praise music. Got some vintage Keith Green from the seventies.”

What an asshole. The dude didn’t wait for my reply—just plopped a cassette into the deck and blasted a Jesus-freak song. No way in hell I’d sleep through that pounding piano and Meth-Teeth’s raspy sing-along. I patted the .38 Special in my pocket. My baby was safe and sound.

“He has risen, Hallelujah!” Meth-Teeth belted the last line, his eyes tearing up like a pussy. And then I saw it: a big, fat red Bible perched between us. A religious nut. Great. Just fucking great.

“So,” I said, patting it. “Does your religion consider teeth-brushing to be a sin?”

I roasted him, and the dude didn’t even bat an eye. Weak sauce. Probably a beta boy scared of his own shadow. But then he smiled—and not just any kind of smile. It was a force that vibrated into my bones, loud and peaceful. Like when a metal band sings a ballad. Powerful. Hits you right in the kidneys.

“No sir, my religion is not opposed to good oral hygiene. But Zometa is. She murdered my pretty smile. Without her, I would have died a long time ago. Bone cancer. I’ve got months, not years.”

“Jesus Christ—”

He interrupted me before I could finish. “Jesus Christ has nothing to do with it. He didn’t give me this sickness because he’s got no sickness to give. And son, if you want to piss me off by acting like God did this to me, then I’ll kick your sorry butt out of this car, run you over, and not think twice about it.”

Shocked that the guy had actual working testicles, I felt like shit for what I said to him. The guy had one foot on a banana peel and the other in a grave. He had every right to beef at me. Just don’t die on my watch, I thought.

Jesus-Boy Meth-Teeth’s hands coiled around the steering wheel, red as a baboon’s ass. His jaw clenched.

“I’m sorry for cussing you out. As a pastor, I should know better.” He paused, scrunching his face. “I’m not afraid of dying. It’s a promotion, you know? Waking up in heaven, my brain can’t even touch it. But you know what keeps me up at night, what twists my gut, what makes my mind race? Are my little boys going to be okay? Is some douchebag gonna swoop in and sweet-talk my wife and then turn around and treat her and the boys like complete shit? Will she be a moron like my mom and stick with him because that’s what a good Christian woman does?”

The bones in his face twisted like warped wood. He pounded the dashboard and screamed loud enough to raise the dead: “FUUCCKK!”

He looked at me, sheepish as hell.

I grinned. “Feels good, don’t it! There ain’t nothing better than an F-bomb when the world’s crashing down on you.” I shook his hand, respecting the shit out of him. “The name’s Mo-Six. Yours?”

“Mike Clifton. And was your mama drunk when she named you that?”

Jesus. For a preacher, the guy could be a real prick. I liked it. “No, it’s where my parents fucked—Motel 6. Mo-Six, get it? It’s on my birth certificate.”

His eyes bulged. “That has to be the single coolest name I’ve ever heard. Mo-Six. If I had a third son, that’s exactly what I’d name him. Mo-Six Clifton. Paging Dr. Mo-Six, you’re wanted in surgery, stat. Man, you’re lucky. Your parents sound awesome. Bet it was a blast growing up in that household.”

I ground my teeth into gunpowder. “Not exactly.”

I jerked my head toward the passenger window, staring at the green blur along the shoulder, my neck muscles locked so hard they throbbed. I needed something cold and flat to wrap my mind around before I shoved my fist through his windshield.

“Longleaf Pine,” I rattled off, my voice flat as a tombstone, reciting the crap I memorized from some worn-out library book just to keep my hands from shaking. “Pinus palustris. Known for its massive twelve-to-eighteen-inch needles and large seed cones. Bald Cypress. Taxodium distichum. Towering swamp trees with flared trunks and knobby knees.”

I kept going, naming every damn trunk, leaf, and shrub we passed like I was a fucking idiot savant, my fingers digging into my knees until my knuckles turned chalk-white. I threw facts at the glass for ten straight minutes, trying to build a wall out of bark and dirt, until the sheer stupidity of it cracked something open in my chest.

The wall caved. Everything came spewing out.

“I have no goddamn clue what it was like growing up in that house,” I spat. “My piece-of-shit dad made sure of it. He bludgeoned Mom to death with a ten-pound bag of frozen chicken when I was six weeks old. Yeah. Real class act, huh? She fled the house after one too many thrashings, but he tracked her down—to, you guessed it, Motel 6. She must’ve known he was coming, because she hid me in the bathtub.”

The engine hummed as the air in the car thinned I couldn’t breathe feeling like I was trapped underwater the car was at least 212 degrees and I was about to die but hey at least I’d be a good-looking corpse and old preacher man Mike he didn’t say a word for three whole miles just stared at the asphalt jaw tight letting my dark stain soak into the seats between us.

When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “Holy shit. Billy Wayne Collins was your dad? Holy shit.”

A heavy silence hung between us, thick enough to choke on. His eyes were dead and unblinking, like something a taxidermist stuffed inside an animal. I swallowed hard, my chest burning, my throat stinging as the acid crawled inside me. I had to puncture the quiet before it smashed me like an insect on a windshield.

“Yeah, you’ve said that already,” I snapped. “And you’re a helluva pastor. Do you kiss your deacons with that mouth, preacher man?”

His face flushed tomato-red, like some bully pantsed him in the junior high lunch line. I felt bad for him.

“It’s okay, man. The damn tabloids made the asshole’s name a household word. They had a field day with the headlines: Wingnut Dad in Foul Rage. Frat boys in Texas still dress up like him— buck teeth, bib overalls, and clutching a bag of frozen Costco chicken wings.”

“Dang. That’s rough. Humanity sucks sometimes. It really does. For the first time in my life, I’ve got no words. Me. Imagine that. At two, my first word was Jesus. Started memorizing scripture at four. But you know what, I wouldn’t give you a sermon even if you asked for it. It’s not what you need.”

I cleared my throat, a ton of shit piling up in it. “So preacher, what do I need? Can you tell me? Because I have no fucking clue. I’m bleeding out right here in this car, ripping my own guts out. Tell me what I need, motherfucker! Tell me what I need, right goddamn now!”

He didn’t look at me like I was a rot-gut reprobate off Skid Row, some sick-ass sinner needing redemption. He looked at me mano a mano, like someone who just saw the exact depth of the wound. Someone who didn’t have to say anything at all.

Because just seeing me was enough.

We drove in complete silence for miles until Mike stared at me and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like an action figure?”

“Yup.” I grimaced, hating my pretty face. “Do you know how fucking hard it was looking like this in foster care? Foster care. Pedophiles. Perverts. Abusers. I came waltzing in with this mug and all the sickos wanted a piece of me. Almost got sent to juvie for ramming a screwdriver in this fat fuck’s eye when he got handsy with me. Luckily, he had priors and got sent to jail. Now the poor bastard has only one eye to see who’s lurking behind him in the shower when he drops the soap. Sorry, preacher, but the thought of him pile-driven up the ass fills me with nothing but joy.”

He smiled. “It does me, too, Mo-Six. It really does. And you know, maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said that anyone who harms a child should have a millstone tied around their neck and be drowned in the sea. Maybe it’s a shiv in the shower. But God sees, Mo. He really sees.”

I cleared my throat, nervous, hands shaking like a grain sifter. I waved a paper in the air. “Billy Wayne Collins’ official release from the Allan B. Polunsky Unit. He gets out today. I was picking him up. Gonna drop him off at a halfway house. But that wasn’t the real destination. It was this wooded area way outside of town. I’d shove a gun into his temple, crotch-slam him with my knee, and crowd his face, so close that I smelled the shit steaming from his mouth. I’d say, ‘Bark like a dog, you worthless piece of crap, or I’ll blast your head clean off your neck.’ I’d toy with him until he relaxed, thinking I was fixing to free his sorry ass. And then I’d aim the gun right between his eyes and yank the trigger. Brains exploding like the Fourth of July.”

I paused, nearly biting off my lip. “You know, if this was my rig, I’d slam my fist right through the windshield and bleed all over these seats. ’Cause I’m pissed. Pissed and ashamed. Murder? Me, nearly wrecking my life over some asshole that’s not worth a warm piss in a pair of snowshoes.” I rolled down the window, hawking my feels onto the asphalt and slapped him on the back. “You’re alright, Preacher. You’re alright.”

Mouth puckering, a crazy spark jumped into Mike’s eyes. “Well, since murder is off the table, I’m going to take you for a real drive—not some pansy little stroll through the neighborhood, but 110 miles an hour, screaming down the back roads with a man who’s got no ties to this world.” He grinned, his Zometa-wrecked teeth flashing in the sunlight. “I suggest you hang onto the oh-shit handles. ’Cause this baby’s ready to rock ’n’ roll.”

He slammed his boot to the floorboards. The Impala screamed, kicking up a rooster tail of red Texas gravel as we tore into the glare—a dying preacher with nothing left to lose, and a kid who finally had something to gain.

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Jill Williams is a writer from the mountains of Georgia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BULL, CITYWIDE LUNCH, DEFENESTRATION, LITERARY GARAGE, REVOLUTION JOHN, URBAN PIGS, FAREWELL TRANSMISSION and elsewhere.