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refrigerators.”
    Creak, swish
.
    “Where y’all go to church?”
    Shane’s dad is a devout Catholic, but I don’t think Shane ever went to church. When Shane married a Jewish girl some of the family feathers were ruffled. I knew about the Catholicism but I didn’t know about the devout. My mom is a church organist, which meant that I grew up Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopalian, depending where the work was at the time. With her at the keyboard and my dad in the choir I never, ever stuck around for the service. I went for long walks along the Ohio River instead. I probably haven’t been to church since I was six or seven. I didn’t try to explain this to Eddie. I just chorused with Shane, we don’t.
    “Y’all oughtta try Fellowship Christian.”
    It’s hard to say definitively what denomination Fellowship Christian belongs to; it’s big enough to constitute its own. It wasn’t new when Eddie mentioned it: in fact it runs the nation’s oldest Dial-A-Prayer service, since 1955. These days it’s a megachurch, almost as popular as the floating casino.
    “I go there every Wednesday night for youth group,” he said. “Y’all could come. If you want.”
    Neither of us replied.
    Creak, swish
.
    Moe seemed pretty placid. That is a strange thing to say about a turtle, but he had come out for the sunshine, and in the bottom of a boat in the middle of a lake he got it in every chink and corner of his gnarly armor. He kept an eye on us but he didn’t move at all. I was wearing sandals and I kept my feet clear, but Shane has been wearing combat boots since he was about three, and he didn’t seem to worry.
    It was Fellowship Christian, years later, which convinced me I could never live in Evansville again. I was driving home from my college upstate for Thanksgiving when I passedit, and what I saw almost made me turn around again. It’s an immense shopping mall of a building with gaudy gold reflective plates all over a lumpy pyramid that approximates a steeple, and out in front of that is a huge marquee advertising whatever is coming up that week. It is, proudly, a twenty-four-hour church. On that marquee in block capitals I read: HOW TO COPE WITH A HEATHEN—WEDNESDAY 7:00 P.M. PASTOR RON PAN . I didn’t much like the idea I had to be coped with, and I was in a town that organized seminars on the subject.
    Shane got it typically right when I told him about it later.
    “Just remember,” he said, “they’re a lot better at coping with us than we are with them.”
    I don’t know, incidentally, whether Fast Eddie, the proprietor of the sleaziest bar in the Midwest, still attends Fellowship Christian. It wouldn’t surprise me.
    Back to that boat: with me and Shane and Eddie and Moe. Eddie said stop and could we pass Moe up to Eddie for his expedition. Moe still lay on the bottom of the boat between Shane and me, but Eddie had decided it was time to drop him in and see what happened. I looked over my shoulder to see where we were in relation to the far bank. Shane shouted. Eddie yelled “Shit!” I turned back around and saw Shane’s thumb on the floor of the boat.
    I fainted.
    Shane completed a BA in comparative literature before he became a librarian, and he went through an infuriating phase of constantly analyzing “texts” in conversation. I put the word in quotes because I thought he should call them stories or novels or poems or advertisements, and not go all faux-scientificabout it. Anyway, in the back of my mind, a little Shane voice is describing this story as a “castration scene” in which the severed thumb is a proxy; in which the protagonist is deprived of his masculinity in an encounter with a primeval force, due partly I suppose to the carelessness of his companions. I think this Shane voice is channeling Derrida or somebody. It’s bullshit. His thumb was reattached, though you can obviously still see the circular scar (Aha, says the voice. So it’s more of a circumcision scene …). He