Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

East.” I raised my eyebrows and grinned. “Huh?”
    “I’m not going to poison my husband.”
    I sighed, an exasperated sigh that I’d learned from my mother. “Then leave him and come away with us, far from Jerusalem where he can’t reach you. He’ll have to divorce you to save face.”
    “Why should I leave, Biff? So I can follow around a man who doesn’t want me and wouldn’t take me if he did?”
    I didn’t know what to say, I felt like knives were twisting in fresh wounds in my chest. I looked at my sandals and pretended to have something caught in my throat.
    Maggie stepped up, put her arms around me, and laid her head against my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “I missed both of you, but I missed just you too.”
    “I know.”
    “I’m not going to sleep with you.”
    “I know.”
    “Then please stop rubbing that against me.”
    “Sure,” I said.
    Just then Joshua stumbled through the gate and crashed into us. We were able to catch ourselves and him before anyone fell. The Messiah was holding the little girl’s pet bunny, hugging it to his cheek with the big back feet swinging free. He was gloriously drunk. “Know what?” Josh said. “I love bunnies. They toil not, neither do they bark. Henceforth and from now on, I decree that whenever something bad happens to me, there shall be bunnies around. So it shall be written. Go ahead Biff, write it down.” He waved to me under the bunny, then turned and started back through the gate. “Where’s the friggin’ wine? I got a dry bunny over here!”
    “See,” I said to Maggie, “you don’t want to miss out on that. Bunnies!”
    She laughed. My favorite music.
    “I’ll get word to you,” she said. “Where will you be?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “I’ll get word to you.”

    It was midnight. The party had wound down and the disciples and I were sitting in the street outside of the house. Joshua had passed out and Bartholomew had put a small dog under his head for a pillow. Before he had left, James had made it abundantly clear that we weren’t welcome in Nazareth.
    “Well?” said Philip. “I guess we can’t go back to John.”
    “I’m sorry I didn’t find the camels,” Bartholomew said.
    “People teased me about my yellow hair,” said Nathaniel.
    “I thought you were from Cana,” I said. “Don’t you have family we can stay with?”
    “Plague,” said Nathaniel.
    “Plague,” we all said, nodding. It happens.
    “You’ll probably be needing these,” came a voice out of the darkness. We all looked up to see a short but powerfully built man walking out of the darkness, leading our camels.
    “The camels,” said Nathaniel.
    “My apologies,” said the man, “my brother’s sons brought them home to us in Capernaum. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get them back to you.”
    I stood and he handed the camel’s reins to me. “They’ve been fed and watered.” He pointed to Joshua, who was snoring away on his terrier. “Does he always drink like that?”
    “Only when a major prophet has been imprisoned.”
    The man nodded. “I heard what he did with the wine. They say he also healed a lame man in Cana this afternoon. Is that true?”
    We all nodded.
    “If you have no place to stay, you can come home with me to Capernaum for a day or two. We owe you at least that for taking your camels.”
    “We don’t have any money,” I said.
    “Then you’ll feel right at home,” said the man. “My name is Andrew.”

    And so we became six.

C hapter 26
    You can travel the whole world, but there are always new things to learn. For instance, on the way to Capernaum I learned that if you hang a drunk guy over a camel and slosh him around for about four hours, then pretty much all the poisons will come out one end of him or the other.
    “Someone’s going to have to wash that camel before we go into town,” said Andrew.
    We were traveling along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (which wasn’t a sea at all). The moon was almost full and it reflected in the lake like a pool of quicksilver. It fell to Nathaniel to clean the camel because he was the official new guy. (Joshua hadn’t really met Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t really agreed to join us, so we couldn’t count him as the official new guy yet.) Since Nathaniel did such a fine job on the camel, we let him clean up Joshua as well. Once he had the Messiah in the water Joshua came out of his stupor long enough to slur something like: “The foxes have