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tail and ran.
    And they took Timmy with them.
     
    Timmy was my best friend in grade school. Before he suddenly changed. Kindergarten through fifth grade we were as thick as thieves. Then one year, he was a week late coming back from Christmas vacation. When he did come back, he told me bluntly: “We ain’t Catholics no more. Mama and Daddy switched us to Pentecostal and they say the rest of yall are going to burn in the fires of hell.”
    How’s that for a conversation starter? The details at the time were fuzzy. His parents had converted and adopted a whole slew of weird rules. Out went the TV. Out went the movies. Out went any music other than approved Christian stuff. No more cursing. In other words, out went everything twentieth-century American kids based their friendships on. Hell, Timmy couldn’t wear shorts anymore. His sister and mother couldn’t cut their hair or wear makeup. On top of that, he had to go to church twice during the week and another two times on Sunday.
    Even more mystifying was that he seemed happy about all of this. How could he be? Everything enjoyable in life had been taken from him. Worse, as the weeks went by, as he grew into his new religion and learned its language, he started talking about the Holy Ghost more and informing me that I was going to hell for listening to Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” When we went to Mass once a week for school, he’d sit there and watch the priest intently as if expecting him to burst into flames.
    “He’s the one who’s really gonna get it,” he’d tell me.
    “God, Timmy. Shut up!” I remember telling him one day. “Why do you even come to this school anymore if you’re so full up on Holy Ghost? Why don’t you go talk in tongues somewhere?”
    My words didn’t seem to make an impact. “Because it’s halfway through the school year, that’s why. Once summer rolls around, I ain’t ever coming back to this school and I’m never going back into one of those churches. All them false idols drive me crazy.”
    “False idols? What are you even talking about?” I wanted to know.
    “Statues and stuff, dummy. All them saint statues ain’t any better than a golden bull.”
    And that was pretty much the end of it. We tolerated each other until the end of the school year, and I spent more and more time with other friends talking about Transformers and Smurfette and whether country music was even worth listening to. And at the end of the school year, Timmy bid us all good-bye and we never really saw him again.
    Of course, with half a lifetime under my belt and a library of gossip at my disposal, Timmy’s happiness at the time isn’t such a mystery anymore. His parents hit a rough patch when the oil market went under in the ’80s. Daddy started drinking. Mommy started yelling. They both started smacking Timmy around. Then one day they realized they needed help or someone was going to get really hurt. Their twice-a-year Catholicism really didn’t do much for them. They probably felt they’d have the eyes of the whole parish on them if they started going to church more often. “There’s the drunk and his beat-up wife,” they’d whisper. A friend of a friend told them about this new church, which just happened to be filled with rules—no drinking, for example—and structure and a whole community of people trying to get their acts together.
    As far as Timmy knew, Daddy caught the Holy Ghost and he quit being a mean old drunk. Now, those are results. And it was certainly more than all those statues in the big brick and marble building had ever done for him.
    Good for Timmy. And good for the Pentecostals.
    Still, they took my friend away from me, the bastards.
     
    And now they seem to be setting up in my backyard. Across the gravel road from the big trailer under the oak tree where the little boy is playing, there are four more—all double-wides by the looks of them—set at fifty-yard intervals from one another. Each trailer is