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"Perhaps. Nobody saw it happen. When he came out, it was as if he was dancing. Whirling and screaming. Dancing round and round in the rain. If it had not been for the rain, he would have burned completely. Perhaps it would have been better for him so. "
Joseph felt a nudge at his leg. "Isaiah! Where have you been?"
The boy said nothing. Joseph knelt down in the mud beside his son and folded him in an embrace. A faint but unmistakable smell reached his nose. The barely perceptible scent of whisky rose from the boy's shirt and the skin on his arms. Joseph released him and stared into his eyes. Isaiah looked away to the still roaring figure in the street.
"Now the Captain has a blessing too."
In the truck that rain-cooled night, Joseph found he could not pray. He could not free himself of the image of the Captain's face, the burned out eyes, the flapping flesh. He wondered where the dancing Captain was now, how much pain he felt, what would become of him. And from deep inside him came a feeling he had not known for four years. He was ashamed of how good it felt. It was, he knew, a feeling of which Jesus would not approve. The rain had stopped. Ibrahim stood leaning on the window and they both looked at the boy asleep on Joseph's knees.
"It was not right," murmured Joseph.
"My friend, tonight it is you who should convert. My God would not have you think so." He laughed. He had been laughing all day. Isaiah stirred. He turned over in Joseph's lap and opened his eyes. He smiled at Ibrahim's grinning face, framed in the truck's window. Then he turned his head to his father.
"Look," he said, his smile growing wider. Joseph followed the boy's outstretched arm. Spanning the whole window frame, sparkling in the light of the street lamp, trembling tautly in the barely perceptible breeze drawn in from the ocean by the rain, stretched the most exquisite spider's web.
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