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and chain boomers. The truck pulled into the Kwik Pump and Meg, a slight and nimble widow in a watch cap and greasy coveralls, jumped out to pump the fuel. After paying cash for the gas (she never used a credit card), Meg turned left out of the lot and drove the truck a block into Swivel, pulled a U-turn, and parked along the curb in front of St. Jude’s Catholic Church. Most days, she would disappear into the chapel for ten minutes, where she would light a votivecandle, pray a decade of the rosary, then reemerge to return up the road past the water tower, recross the overpass, and hang a left down the southbound ramp for Clearwater and the scrap metal processing center.
    But today was Christmas. When Meg dismounted from the truck and walked across the St. Jude’s parking lot past the concrete Virgin Mary sheltering beneath the protruding half of a vintage bathtub buried in the vertical, she was carrying her best dress hung and sheathed in dry-cleaner’s plastic. Today the truck would sit parked all day long at the curb as Meg assisted Father Carl in the celebration of both Christmas Morning masses. She was weary, having returned from midnight mass only a few hours previously, and prior to that having spent Christmas Eve day dissecting the combine, tamping down the Festiva, and loading the truck, but for Meg, devotion trumped all. If it seemed strange that she had driven to Christmas services in a loaded junk truck, it helped to know that it was her only vehicle. If Meg was invited to remove a beached Buick from someone’s yard, she arrived in the junk truck. If she had been invited for cocktails, she would have arrived in the junk truck.
    And if she had been allowed to scrap that water tower, the pope would have received 15 percent of the proceeds.
    St. Jude’s Catholic Church was nothing fancy. No soaring arches like the church in Boomler. No frescoes, no life-size, lifelike, bleeding and be-thorned Christ mannequin nailed to a towering cross of solid plaster. Rather, the crucifix that hung above Father Carl during services was punched from polished brass, the suffering Son represented in abstract fashion, his halo formed of tack-welded wire. St. Jude’s had been constructed in the late 1960s from blueprints composed by an architect apparently heavily influencedby early Brutalism and Postwar Basement Rec Room. The exterior was done up in concrete and browns, and the interior ran heavily to blond paneling. The pews were padded with Naugahyde, the carpet was a close-nubbed tan-and-mustard-striped affair the texture of a polyester pot scrubber, and the figurines representing the twelve stations of the cross hung on their plaques like dated bowling trophies, the mustachioed long-haired disciples projecting the mien of gentle folk rockers. In short, you could imagine Michelangelo giving the whole works half a star. There were no bells in the belfry, rather a set of metal horn speakers hidden in a cupola that blared out tape-recorded chimes. But every single time Margaret Magdalene Jankowski stepped through the doors of St. Jude’s, dipped her fingertips in the holy water, and crossed herself, she thought—no, felt —only one word: sanctuary .
    Meg had been christened in St. Jude’s, her father (hale and hearty and having just purchased his first tow truck) and mother cradling her in a long white gown as a priest in horn-rimmed glasses sprinkled her scalp. The pews were full in those days, most of the congregants’ faces windburned from fieldwork. By the time she took her first communion, the priest with horn-rimmed glasses was assisted by the young Father Carl, who in those days had all his hair and a fat set of sideburns. It was Father Carl who married Meg and her high school sweetheart, Dougie Clements, in St. Jude’s the summer after they graduated, and it was Father Carl who performed the funeral mass two months later when Dougie was killed by a drunk driver, hit while helping