Free Island of Divine Music by John Addiego Page A

Ciso threw the car into neutral and coasted the last couple of miles to the general store and filling station, as if by some practiced routine. The building wasdark. Ciso tapped the horn. Hendley gripped the handle of his revolver.
    A geezer in overalls staggered out of the building. Closed! he yelled.
    Fill her up? Ciso waved a twenty out the window. Hendley slid out of the shotgun seat, saying he’d better call the girls at the motel. Good idea, Ciso said. The agent called his partner and tried to describe where he and the suspect were.
    Didn’t you hear me? The geezer spat and walked up to Ciso’s window. The till is closed. I can’t make no change. Ciso told him to keep the change.
    A couple of hours later the sun was peeking over a range of barren mountains to the east, and the sage desert stretched in all directions around them. They had already passed a DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, ATOMIC TESTING SITE sign, and Hendley had convinced Narciso to turn around. Now the top was down, the frigid air was rich with the scent of sage, the radio was playing show tunes from LA, and Hendley had given up on his partner. He was wondering if he shouldn’t just waste the old greaseball out here in the middle of nowhere and boost his car. Narciso opened the cigar box and offered Hendley a foot-long Cuban Corona.
    They were doing ninety on a pencil-straight highway which ended in a mountain range, perhaps twenty miles distant, perhaps fifty. To the north was a tiny dust cloud moving slowly toward the highway. Hendley held the cigar and laughed. Cigars, he said.
    The best, Charlie. Ciso reached into his pants and produced aZippo. The dust cloud got larger over time and grew wheels and vague geometric proportions. It was approaching the highway slowly, on a perpendicular trajectory. These are the very best, Charlie. We gotta enjoy life, right?
    Hendley cupped his hands around the flame, drew on the cigar, leaned back in his seat, and laughed. He laughed with great embarrassment and relief, in great clouds of smoke. Narciso steered with his knees and lit a stogie for himself, laughing along. The vehicle running on a perpendicular track was identifiable now, an ancient flatbed truck, its cargo a flock of dusty sheep, its driver a small fellow in a slouched cowboy hat, bouncing up and down, staring straight ahead. Hendley watched him approach through clouds of cigar smoke, through gasps of laughter. The cowboy never moved his head to right or left, and Narciso never relented on the gas pedal. It didn’t seem possible to the suspended special agent, with a thousand square miles around them, with only two vehicles on that planar expanse of the planet, with the truck creeping along a separate road and Ciso flying across the blacktop to the horns of Jimmy Lunceford’s Swing Band, that there could be a collision, and so his last thoughts were happy ones.
    The truck crept across the highway, and Ciso hit it. Former Agent Hendley flew through the windshield and was killed instantly, as were three sheep. The man in the front of the truck fell drunkenly onto the desert and cursed the bumps and bruises he received. The Cadillac was destroyed, squashed like a grape under an immense foot. Narciso was thrown into the air.
    He hung there for some time, a hundred miles from an atom-bomb crater, a hundred yards from a billboard with the legs of chorus girls and the words
Last Chance
painted across it. He floated above the frost-rimed sagebrush, the branches aflame with sunrise, and fell to earth among the crying lambs, unhurt, cushioned by the beautiful fleece and the soft flesh of God’s innocent creatures.

THE DIVINE COMEDY
    Angelo
    B ecause his mother and the allergist thought he should avoid breathing, because his father rarely took notice, and because he fell dead center in a clan of athletic or adorable siblings, Angelo Verbicaro started making weird noises, squeaky voices slid through the cracks of doors, impersonations of family who’d just stepped