Excerpt from Holy City by Henry Wise, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Holy City

FIRE WAS THE DREAM that broke him.

He sat stiff as a dead cat, felt for the handle of his pistol under the seat, relaxed. The sad night came back to him, one of many like it, riding indefinitely, listening to the angry word of God through a thin static distance, the voice somehow both austere and intimate, seeming to speak directly to him with piercing certainty.

He listened because there was nothing else out here—no other radio station—between hamlets or villages or four-way intersections, some of which at one point probably had been towns, nothing to see between them but a country undulating in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium, a pulse one could assess only by covering its distances, surprising because the countryside felt dead otherwise. It was not the soft, green junglelike vegetation of so much of Virginia but a hard, coarse, spiky land. The lonely roads wended like snakes through close forest or open fields or woods felled entirely for their lumber, leaving the ground as naked and weird as a skinned bear.

And as he passed the fading houses like craters, kudzu-covered or through-grown with wild privet and poison ivy and chipping of paint, out of a wood-paneled darkness came the dark, paternal, familiar voice, companionate and suggestive of violence, of guile, the voice clean-shaven, austere, piercing and expectant, some local celebrity preacher in a countryside rife with bewildering crime.

Will Seems had returned from a decade in Richmond—the "Holy City"—to a land he had called home each year of that decade, a country he now saw was peopled by a kind of disparate lost congregation. Last year, a man had cut his wife's throat with a Buck lock-blade, shooting himself after with a Walther PPK, failing on both counts. His wife was able to stop the bleeding from her neck with a pillow before calling 911, and the man woke up in a hospital room missing most of his jaw and wearing handcuffs to boot. Then, a few months ago now, a man in Halifax County who had been stopped for a burnt-out taillight had shot the policeman dead and driven away without contest.

Even now, no leads. But one of the strangest incidents had occurred only recently. A complaint had been submitted in town because of an odor emanating from a particular home. The middle-aged unmarried resident had wrapped her dead mother—deceased by natural causes—in winter blankets, leaving the body in the house for over two months. Will remembered the investigation they'd conducted, wearing masks that did little to mitigate the stench, counting out with watering eyes 116 air fresheners sprinkled over the quilts. The sheriff was glad enough to let Troy St. Pierre, the medical examiner, remove the corpse, but he and Will were stuck with the daughter of the deceased. When questioned, the woman could not explain why she hadn't reported her own mother's death, the only reason they had cause to arrest her. Will saw in her a sad and childish desperation that was not necessarily unique; he'd seen it in the faces of the county, a puckered, hopeless, dopey defeat. Will guessed she was so afraid of being alone in this world that she had considered the dead welcome company.

Will got out of his truck and stretched and made use of a tree, looking down at the flat water of the creek, the dream still nagging him, a strong odor of smoke refusing to fade. He couldn't keep doing this, riding late-night to wear himself out, ending up back at the creek to sleep and leaving early, before the fishermen came with their buckets and their lines. He'd smoked too much last night, tasted the cotton mouth now, remembered an acute craving for a Coke with vanilla, the way it was served at the nearest Waffle House over in South Hill. He reached in the pickup and took a sip now of leftover coffee in an open Styrofoam cup he'd picked up yesterday evening from the Get N' Go, some cooked-down tired version of what it had been when brewed that morning, and now it was twenty-four hours old, and it seemed nothing had happened in twenty-four hours, but that everything and everyone had moved and breathed just that much forward.

Excerpted from HOLY CITY © 2024 by Henry Wise. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.