Ozzie dismissed my concern with a wave of his six-fingered hand. "Unlike you, I've got a gun. More than one."

"Start keeping them handy. I'm so sorry to have drawn him here."

"Nonsense. He was just something stuck to your shoe that you didn't know was there."

Each time that I leave this house after a visit, Ozzie hugs me as a father hugs a beloved son, as neither of us was ever hugged by his father.

And every time, I am surprised that he seems so fragile in spite of his formidable bulk. It's as if I can feel a shockingly thin Ozzie within the mantles of fat, an Ozzie who is being steadily crushed by the layers that life has troweled upon him.

Standing at the open front door, he said, "Give Stormy a kiss for me."

"I will."

"And bring her around to bear witness to my beautiful exploded cow and the villainy it represents."

"She'll be appalled. She'll need wine. We'll bring a bottle."

"No need. I have a full cellar."

I waited on the porch until he closed the door and until I heard the deadbolt being engaged.

As I negotiated the cow-strewn front walk and then rounded the Mustang to the driver's door, I surveyed the quiet street. Neither Robertson nor his dusty Ford Explorer was to be seen.

In the car, when I switched on the engine, I suddenly expected to be blown up like the Holstein. I was too jumpy.

I followed a twisty route from Jack Flats to St. Bartholomew's Catholic Church in the historical district, giving a tail plenty of opportunities to reveal himself. All the traffic behind me seemed to be innocent of the intent to pursue. Yet I felt watched.

EIGHTEEN

PICO MUNDO IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER TOWN. THE RECENT construction of a five-story apartment building made longtime residents dizzy with an unwanted sense of metropolitan crowding and led to editorials in the Maravilla County Times that used phrases like "high-rise blight," and worried about a future of "heartless canyons of bleak design, in which people are reduced to the status of drones in a hive, and into which the sun never fully reaches."

The Mojave sun is not a timid little Boston sun or even a don't-worry-be-happy Caribbean sun. The Mojave sun is a fierce, aggressive beast that isn't going to be intimidated by the shadows of five-story apartment buildings.

Counting its tower and the spire that sits atop the tower, St. Bartholomew's Church is by far the tallest structure in Pico Mundo. Sometimes at twilight, under the barrel-tile roofs, the white stucco walls glow like the panes in a storm lantern.

With half an hour remaining before sunset on this Tuesday in August, the western sky blazed orange, steadily deepening toward red, as though the sun were wounded and bleeding in its retreat. The white walls of the church took color from the heavens, and appeared to be full of holy fire.

Stormy waited for me in front of St. Bart's. She sat on the top step, beside a picnic hamper.

She had traded her pink-and-white Burke amp; Bailey's uniform for sandals, white slacks, and a turquoise blouse. She had been cute then; she was ravishing now.

With her raven hair and jet-black eyes, she might have been the bride of a pharaoh, swept forward in time from ancient Egypt. In her eyes are mysteries to rival those of the Sphinx and those of all the pyramids that ever were or ever will be excavated from the sands of the Sahara.

As if reading my mind, she said, "You left your hormone spigot running. Crank it shut, griddle boy. This is a church."

I snatched up the picnic hamper and, as she rose to her feet, I kissed her on the cheek.

"On the other hand, that was a little too chaste," she said.

"Because that was a kiss from Little Ozzie."

"He's sweet. I heard they blew up his cow."

"It's a slaughterhouse, plastic Holstein splattered everywhere you look."

"What's next-hit squads shooting lawn gnomes to pieces?"

"The world is mad," I agreed.

We entered St. Bart's through the main door. The narthex is a softly lighted and welcoming space, paneled in cherry wood stained dark with ruby highlights.

Instead of proceeding into the nave, we turned immediately to the right and stepped up to a locked door. Stormy produced a key and let us into the bottom of the bell tower.

Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bart's, is Stormy's uncle. He knows she loves the tower, and he indulges her with a key.

When the door fell quietly shut behind us, the sweet fragrance of incense faded, and a faint musty smell arose.

The tower stairs were dark. Unerringly, I found her lips for a quick but sweeter kiss than the first, before she switched on the light.

"Bad boy."

"Good lips."

"Somehow it's too strange… getting tongue in church."

"Technically, we're not in the church," I said.

'And I suppose technically that wasn't tongue."

"I'm sure there's a more correct medical term for it."

"There's a medical term for you," she said.

"What's that?" I wondered as, carrying the hamper, I followed her up the spiral staircase.

"Priapic."

"What's it mean?"

"Perpetually horny."

"You wouldn't want a doctor to cure that, would you?"

"Don't need a doctor. Folk medicine offers a reliable cure."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"A swift, hard blow to the source of the problem."

I winced and said, "You are no Florence Nightingale. I'm going to start wearing a cup."

At the top of the spiral stairs, a door opened to the belfry

A carillon of three bronze bells, all large but of different sizes, hung from the ceiling in the center of this lofty space. A six-foot-wide catwalk encircled them.

The bells had rung for vespers at seven and would not ring again until morning Mass.

Three sides of the belfry were open above a waist-high wall, presenting splendid views of Pico Mundo, the Maravilla Valley, and the hills beyond. We stationed ourselves at the west side, the better to enjoy the sunset.

From the hamper, Stormy produced a Tupperware container filled with shelled walnuts that she had deep-fried and seasoned lightly with both salt and sugar. She fed me one. Delicious-both the walnut and being fed by Stormy.

I opened a bottle of good Merlot and poured while she held the wineglasses.

This was why earlier I had not finished the glass of Cabernet: As much as I love Little Ozzie, I would rather drink with Stormy.

We don't eat in this perch every evening, only two or three times a month, when Stormy needs to be high above the world. And closer to Heaven.

"To Ozzie," Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. "With the hope that one day there'll be an end to all his losses."

I didn't ask what she meant by that because I thought perhaps I knew. By the affliction of his weight, there is much in life that Ozzie has been denied and may never experience.

Citrus-orange near the western horizon, blood-orange across the ascending vault, the sky darkened to purple directly overhead. In the east, the first stars of the night would soon begin to appear.

"The sky's so clear," Stormy said. "We'll be able to see Cassiopeia tonight."

She referred to a northern constellation named after a figure of classic mythology, but Cassiopeia was also the name of Stormy's mother, who had died when Stormy was seven years old. Her father had perished in the same plane crash.

With no family but her uncle, the priest, she had been placed for adoption. When in three months the adoption failed for good reason, she made it explicitly clear that she didn't want new parents, only the return of those whom she had loved and lost.

Until the age of seventeen, when she graduated from high school, she was raised in an orphanage. Thereafter, until she was eighteen, she had lived under the legal guardianship of her uncle.