You know the story. In the town where they’d both grown up, they could look across the river to Mexico. Both of them had seen cheapo Catholic candles lit in the bedrooms of people they’d worked on, and both of them had been called miracle workers. Back in the beginning, Lorna Grant and Vix Beller were small time. They worked El Paso to Houston and down the Gulf Coast, him mostly on women and her mostly on men. For a while, they changed people’s hearts and fixed people’s minds. Then, because this was how things went in Texas, things got broken again. This was after the government collapsed but before God and the law got forgotten. Lorna and Vix were both practitioners of the oldest profession, and found easy employment. Their techniques dated from the time of Christ, but roadside religions found them to be sinners. By the time they finally met, late in ’29, Vix Beller’d been chased by a mob with pitchforks, and forced to steal a car to put miles between himself and the town whose women he’d waked into wanting.
