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... Anyhow, back in Billy’s House of Shimmy, Lily clapped her hands in front of Dumble’s eyes, awakening him from his trance. He saw the Light dim and take back the form of a fine daughter of Eve, with meat in all the places Adam’s boys liked it.
... Lily saw the look on his face, the creases formed from constant scowling which melted as he grew tender in her presence. It touched her deep and pure.
... “Let’s you and me get the fuck outta here,” she said.

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... The stretch of highway had a real name, but no one ever used it and neither shall we. Skidmark Row is what folks called it, named, they say, after Jimmy Joe Jimmy organized pick-up truck drag races there in the ‘50s. Many a child was conceived under the moonlight at a certain hollow spot of land, near a speed limit sign with a face full of buckshot. They say that high levels of mental retardation and deformation amongst those borne from the sweaty, moonshine-soaked rutting at Penetration Point were the result of drag race-tainted air, the gasoline fumes and burnt rubber particles. But no one knows for sure why so many web-toed kids and microcephalics can trace their lineage to this spot. Could just be the place was cursed, a view which they who see things Dumble’s way would be inclined to take.
... Penetration Point sat at one end of Skidmark Row, also bookmarked by Billy’s House of Shimmy, and was the start of a long stretch of road filled with enterprise upon enterprise of hellish, immoral, commandment-breaking, taboo-embracing, illicit substance-pushing, surgically-enhanced flesh-peddling, devil music-playing businesses that had little regard for naught but under-the-counter gain.
... Jimmy Joe Jimmy knew not what he had birthed when he founded his pick-up drags some half-century earlier, and the area soon succumbed to gambling and, quickly thereafter, vice after vice until there were no vices left to succumb to. Jimmy saw not a penny from his ever-swelling Frankenstein monster and died of syphilis on the steps of a low-rent whorehouse nearby sometime in 1988.
... Far as Dumble was concerned, Skidmark Row was a very literal outpost of Hell. Denizens of the underworld had settled in comfortably in our ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland and were having themselves a time. It was more than this good Christian man could bear, so he took it upon himself to bat clean-up for the Rapture.
... And so he sat in his daddy’s hearse under the buckshot-riddled speed limit sign at Penetration Point, and outlined his plan to a rapt Lily in a voice made of gravel, tobacco and deepest rumbling bass—a vocal cocktail that surely comprises the voice of a real man. He said:
... “I’m gonna kill every last one of these demon sons a' bitches nesting on this here stretch of track and return ‘em to the underworld what spawned ‘em. I’ll be doin’ it for many a reason, primarily because it’s the Godly thing to do, but secondarily because they kept such a rare source of purity and light as yourself captive for purposes of witchcraft and black mass ritual. Crowley woulda called you a Scarlet Woman. A muse for the conjuring of evil things, a tool of satanic magic. Babalon. Any Christian man would take one look at you and realize you ain’t no Scarlet Woman. You ain’t no color but white.”
... Lily, more modestly covered now in a tank top and cut-off jeans, studied Dumble, his silver hair, the lines on his face that read like the Rosetta Stone of hard-living. His ice-blue eyes, his lips wide and full, his teeth straight as small ivory tombstones. She had never really thought of herself as a black magic muse, but now as she pondered on it, the notion made some sense: they had been trance-like, those glazed-over serial-killer looks in the eyes of the stinky, filthy-fingered pervs who stuffed grubby dollar bills in her garter with one hand while masturbating with the other. She’d previously put this down to the fact that she was the holy trinity of tight little numbers—nubile, firm, and top-heavy—but hearing Dumble, she was open to the idea of satanic hocus-pocus in the air at the House of Shimmy. Billy, after all, owned every single Sabbath record, even the Tony Martin ones. And that stuffed moose head mounted above his bar had some kinda fucked-up presence, no doubt.
... Lily was a girl with a big imagination but little actual brains. She was what folks would have once referred to as “fey.” Like many young people, Lily felt trapped and doomed by her backwater surroundings and often felt that her only means of escape would be to hitch a ride with some trucker and suck his chubby for the privilege of the trip. Being both good-hearted and adverse to blowjobs (when sober, anyhow), this method of escape was never exploited.
... Lily had heard the legend of Calvin Dumble, as many had, and followed his wanderings in what passed for the local rag. She had secretly prayed for Dumble’s arrival, and now that it was here, she intended to make the most of it.
... “You’re gonna need my help, Reverend Dumble,” she said, “I know these parts and I know the bad folk you speak about. I can drive stick, not real good, but I can manage, and I know of you and your work and have been chronicling it through the fine medium of comics.”
... This was true. Lily drew crudely-illustrated comic strips featuring Dumble’s adventures. Her work had been met with silence by the New York funnybook publishers to which it was sent, but Lily felt it was just a matter of time before Ralphie, the postman who sold magic-mushroom soup on the sly, would rap on her trailer door, a contract from those Marvel boys in his hand.
... She reached into her dufflebag and produced one of her works, Rev. Calvin Dumble vs. Pederast Bill. Dumble thumbed through it. Lily chewed on her thumbnail as he read silently, mouthing the words to himself.
... “This here shit is gosh-darned beautiful,” he finally said.