Memory. How it pushes time through the colander of experience. Or has he confused that too?

For as long as he can remember, he remembers blowing shit up. The fierce spike of adrenaline from asshole to neck as the wick spits and sparks, the rush of guilt after. Adrenaline comes and goes like friends and lovers, but guilt sticks around, as real as scars and burnt skin.

On a mid July afternoon, west of New Orleans, where the land that's escaped the swamp is covered by sugar cane, he sits between the humped rows, cross-legged like his ancestors, the great warrior Cherokee, once did. Blades of four foot cane lick and bite his arms.

There, on the end of a dirt service road interlacing the cane fields, butted against an outcropping of cypress and magnolia, a 1985 Pontiac rests, abandoned for a week now.

Each day after school for the past week, he raced the mile and a half to check on it. Better than a stranded or wounded wild animal, this creature he would bring back to life. Because sometimes, he thought, one must bring the phoenix to the flame.

Today, after the farmers who watch the fields go home, this 25th of July, there will be one more submission, to the god of flame. No drunk brother will murder this vehicle, no turncoat bribed by Chevy or Ford.

He sips Amaretto-- the only liquor he could swindle that day. Great acts demand great courage. Great courage demands great men. In liquor lies forgetfulness. In forgetfulness lies salvation.

"Never hold on to anything you can't let go one day," he muses.

Blowing up a car is not so easy. Lacking dynamite, armed only with a Zippo bearing a Led Zeppelin logo, he was not well-prepared.

The pleather seats will not light. The carpets are flame-retardant. The doors are locked-- he has no access to the engine. Sure, he could bust the windows and pop the hood, but no. That would be a desecration. This is rebirth by flame. There will be not one broken bone. Not one shattered window.

The cane sticks as he pushes and pulls it in and out of the gas tank in an orgiastic rhythm. Quick! Before somebody comes! Quick!

The flame from his lighter licks the cane and trips jerkily down the pole into the tank. He turns and runs.

More ferociously than expected, the back end of the car lifts off the ground, followed by the doom crack of explosion. Black and grey smoke vomits from the car. A second explosion blows the windows out.

He lies prone in the cane, pants wet from pissing himself. The jeans tug at his crotch. Flames climb and then wilt the cane 10 feet away. He thinks of Ginger Lynn and Playboy magazines discovered long ago in the woods.

In dreams, the Hell priests babble about stinks of smoldering vulcanized rubber. He breathes in deeply.

We remember smell much longer than sight. We remember feeling much longer than the puzzle pieces of thought. He sits there and watches the car sizzle in the afternoon, wondering if he should come back after dinner.

Walking away, he hears the screams of the metal, and smiles. The demon escapes Cahokia once more.