THIS IS WHAT Truck and Trailer told Hollis: Down where the springs gush from the dam, they’d met a young man who asked about Hollis. The young man was walking along a creek path choked with honeysuckle and clouds of bees. He was smooth-shaven (shiny, Trailer had said, like a baby) and dressed in a white dress shirt and tie like a missionary, a leather satchel draped over a shoulder. A motley-colored dog trotted behind him, but they couldn’t say if it was his. The young man paused next to their camp and gave them some breakfast tacos in a paper bag. He sat on a rock and watched them eat, seeming to take pleasure in their appetites. When Trailer winced from his bad tooth, the young man suggested a tincture of clove oil until he could see a dentist. He asked them about the area but seemed to know the neighborhoods already. He spoke about the natural beauty of the landscape. Live oaks and cypress. Told them the hills all around were once a mountain range that was beaten down by a sea. Those mountains, he said, were still down there, moving, sending tremors in the earth.
Hearing this, Truck and Trailer nodded and chewed. The young man was a gentleman and a scholar, Truck said. Trailer said that the young man had a peculiar way of talking. Like someone standing a ways off but whispering in your ear.
“You some kind of missionary?” Trailer had asked the man.
“No, nothing like that,” the young man said, and smiled as if he was pleased they thought so.
“Aren’t you hot in that getup?” Truck asked him, motioning to his tie.
The young man, staring off through a break in the trees at the creek, didn’t seem to hear. “Do you gentlemen know a Mr. Finger?” he asked, but in a casual way, as if he could take or leave the answer.
Truck and Trailer nodded but stopped chewing.
“Hollis, you mean?” Trailer said.
“Yes,” he said. “Hollis.”
“Hollis hurt his head in Iraq,” Truck said, excusing Hollis his many trespasses.
“That’s why I need to talk to him.”
“To help him?” Trailer asked.
“That’s right,” the man said. “I’d like to offer a little help here and there.” The young man’s forehead gleamed. His cheeks were flushed. He picked up a small, flat piece of limestone and tossed it toward the creek, where it struck the surface several times and disappeared.
“You with the VA?” Truck asked, squinting up at his bright face.
Wind blew high in the trees, but the air close to the ground was stifling. Truck said for some reason he thought the motley dog, which lay motionless on its side on a slab of rock, had died. And then a tremor went through its body that made him think it might be whelping puppies.
“You with us or against us?” Trailer said, wiping a clump of egg from his mouth.
“That’s enough, Arthur,” Truck said quietly.
“It’s okay,” said the man. “You’re just looking out for your friend.”
“Hollis ain’t done nothing to nobody,” Trailer said.
The man said he was sure that was true, that sometimes things got confused and had to be turned inside out to be understood. And even then they wouldn’t always give up their mystery. He said he knew a man who once set fire to a whole apartment building out of love. The man had immolated himself in his lover’s bed.
“I don’t get you,” Truck said.
The young man threw another stone and it skipped silently across the creek.
“Immolated?” Trailer asked. “Set himself on fire?”
“That’s right,” the young man said. “He couldn’t be separated from her. A moth to the flame, so to speak.”
“People died in this fire? Besides him?”
The young man seemed to think about this for a second. “It was a very fierce love,” he said.
The dog now started barking at something scuttling in the underbrush, an armadillo or possum, and the young man tossed it something from his pocket to quiet it. He pulled a flask from his satchel, took a drink, and passed it to Truck and Trailer. They sipped on the whiskey for a bit. The young man seemed cheerful but mindful of their qualms, Truck told Hollis. At this stage of the telling it became unclear to Hollis whether or not they’d told the young man about Hollis’s sleeping in his art car on side streets, or his trips below the gushing spring to swim and bathe, or his recent visions of the girls, though Hollis had pressed them on these points.