Frankenstein

sandals, and his hat was a halo.
    “What an amazing thing,” Mr. Lyss said.
    Nummy didn’t see what was so amazing. Of course, Jesus could ride a horse if he wanted to. Jesus could do anything.
    Nummy heard wood creaking, like a floorboard or something, in another part of the house.
    “What’s that?” he asked.
    “What’s what?”
    “That creak.”
    “Old houses creak. Nobody’s here.”
    “You might be wrong about somebody coming home,” Nummy said.
    “Peaches, you remember the mailbox out at the end of the lane, at the street, how it was painted so fancy?”
    “I liked the pretty mailbox.”
    “Part of what was on it were the words ‘Saddle up with Jesus.’”
    “I can’t read nothing,” Nummy said. “Grandmama she used to read me good stories. Before she died, Grandmama she made tapes so I can hear her telling my favorites anytime I want.”
    “You didn’t like it when I took the mail out of their box and went through it,” Mr. Lyss said. “But I’ve looked through their mail before, and I learned important things when I did.”
    As they entered the kitchen, Nummy said, “Learned what things?”
    “For one thing, the first time I came here, I saw the mail was addressed to the Reverend and Mrs. Kelsey Fortis, which confirmed they live here like I thought.”
    “You mean we housebreaked a preacher?”
    Mr. Lyss opened a door, said, “Cellar,” and closed the door. He said, “When I came to town, I got the local newsrag and read up on the place, with an eye toward learning what passes for social life in this pathetic backwater. Bad men like me need to know what good people are up to, so I know when it’s best to visit them.”
    “When is it best to visit them?” Nummy asked.
    “When they’re not home, of course.” He opened another door and looked over the shelves in a walk-in pantry. “In the local paper I read about the first-Tuesday-of-every-month social that the Reverend Fortis’s church holds at some shit-kicking roadhouse. Sorry about that, Peaches.”
    “That’s good.”
    “What’s good?”
    “Being sorry for the bad word. Being sorry, that’s a start.”
    “Yeah, well. So I found Fortis’s address and waited for a first Tuesday, which is tonight. Just a while ago, when I looked in the saddle-up-with-Jesus box, I saw the day’s mail still there, so I knew nobody had come home yet. And considering that the social begins in hardly more than half an hour, I’d bet my whole bankroll—by which I mean three fives, ten ones, ten more ones, and three more ones—that they aren’t coming home until after.”
    “Betting is wicked.”
    Closing the pantry door, Mr. Lyss said, “He probably keeps them in the study, if there is a study.”
    “Keeps what?” Nummy asked.
    “A minister needs a study to write his sermons,” Mr. Lyss said, and he found the study along the hall that led from the kitchen.
    The room was all leather furniture, pictures of horses, statues of horses, and a big desk.
    Nummy thought the desk was what Mr. Lyss wanted, so he could find and read the preacher’s sermons, but it wasn’t the desk at all. Along one wall stood a big cabinet with four tall doors that had glass in them. Beyond the glass were guns, and the sight of them made Mr. Lyss happy.
    “A week ago, the first time I looked through the good reverend’s mail, there was a magazine from the National Rifle Association. So back at the LaPierre dump, I figured this was where I could weaponize myself to defend against the Martians.”
    Mr. Lyss tried the cabinet doors, but they were locked. Instead of using his picks, he took a horse statue from the desk and used it to smash the four panes.
    “You got to pay for that from the lottery,” Nummy said.
    “No problem. It’ll be a lot of money.”
    Watching Mr. Lyss take different guns and boxes of bullets from the cabinet, Nummy grew nervous.
    Instead of watching, he went around the room, looking at all the photographs of horses. Some were just horses alone, some were people standing beside horses, and some were people sitting on horses, but none of the people was Jesus.
    Nummy heard the creaking again.
    “There it is,” he said.
    “There what is?”
    “You heard.”
    “You spook too easy.”
    “Now it’s stopped.”
    Mr. Lyss was wearing a long heavy coat that he’d borrowed from Poor Fred, and after he loaded the guns, he put one in each of the two big pockets of the coat. He dropped bullets in other pockets, handfuls of them