The Vicar's Man-o-War is driving a blue black muscle car a thousand miles an hour on ragged two-lane asphalt, tearing noisily through rural Macon County, Alabama; it is well after midnight. I hide in the back, down in the footwell, and when I look up I see the churning blur of black trees against the moonlit sky. Muddy Waters is on the radio, distant and tinny.

He reaches back with ribbony fingers, long tentacles which caress my damp face. The car seat groans with his motion, the worn leather stretching and creaking.

I curl up into a ball and try to hide my head but I can feel his touch on my neck. The sense of hurtling speed is making me ill. As we crest each rise, my stomach seems to float uneasily. I am cold and terrified.

The car roars like a dragon, but it's not loud enough to mask his strange choral moans; subsonic whale sounds, booming and squealing over rangy delta blues. Tears arc across my cheeks to gather at the corners of my mouth, and I can't help but taste them. Mingled with his metallic sea smells, my tears bring to mind the ocean, and I clamp my lips tightly. I will not let him in. I am not going to drown. My throat is tight, and my heart is pounding.

He tilts back his opened hardshell face and bellows deeply. From the blowhole in his chest flecks of spittle and hot cetacean air rustle into the car. Without seeing it, I know that the windshield glass blurs across with his dank breathing. I have done this myself before and written my name in the bloom with my finger. I fear we will crash.

There is a bottle-glass green glow from the dashboard, and also the moon; it's not enough to keep away shadows, and so the car is dense with them, gloomy and crowded. Rocking to myself, I sob quietly while the shadows watch. It seems this night can only end in a fireball.

One song fades and another begins, while faster and faster the shapes outside stream by. We go charging and swerving along. I peek to see his head lolling back and I wonder how it is that we haven't yet careened into a ditch or a thick, sudden oak. His groans and slow gurgles reverberate fathoms deep, and he rolls his head side to side in strange ecstasy as though he were fellated.

In my childhood, I once crept downstairs - not all the way, but enough to spy through the bannister - and I watched my cousins having sex on the couch. They were facing away from me and it looked like this, just his head swaying and hers resting in his lap. I did not understand what I was seeing, and I do not understand it now; the Vicar's Man-o-War is a hermaphrodite with one hand on the wheel and the other still clammy on my nape.

I could open the door and hurtle through it, but I am a coward and the violence of the very idea is paralyzing. I try to make myself as small a possible and I watch the stars above over churning black woods. Soon we reach the highway, and he cuts the wheel to the side, swinging the bully car up the ramp. The road is empty and so no one sees us, no police pull us over. On this broad straightaway he floors it, and the car lunges forward impossibly faster, and then faster still, reaching a speed where the whole machine seems to vibrate. It threatens to simply fly apart, thrumming and trembling. But we are going too fast to crash now; it's unthinkable. Surely anything before us would disintegrate into powder, as before an irresistible force. As before the juggernaut, the Jagannātha, the God-chariot, and to die beneath its wheels is the short ticket to Paradise.

There is the ass that pulls the idol through the city. When those that come to worship and adore his burden bow before it, then the ass mistakenly thinks that they have come to worship him. He struts pridefully all the way to the temple whereupon he stubbornly refuses to obey his master's commands. He is whipped most viciously for this mistaken perspective and sorted back into his proper place; he is meant only to bear the holy load until he is dead, and even then yoked, without the means to fall beneath the very wheels he pulls.