Jesus' Son

Following a fight with his girlfriend, the narrator gets on a bus and goes to his favorite bar, The Vine. There, he runs into a man named Wayne. Wayne offers him a way to make some money, and they take the narrator’s car to the fields outside of town. On a riverbank, they find an abandoned house, which was previously destroyed by a flood. They rip open the walls and steal the copper wiring. As they work, Wayne reveals that the house is his former home. They hear a boat approaching from the outside; it is pulling a nude woman attached to a giant kite.

Driving back to town, Wayne asks the narrator to take a detour to a farmhouse set on a hill. The narrator and Wayne head onto the porch, and the narrator waits at one end while Wayne speaks to the woman who owns the house at the other. The narrator guesses that “Wayne was the storm that stranded her here” based on their dynamic (49). When they leave, Wayne tells the narrator that the woman is his wife. The narrator wonders whether the woman was the same person they’d seen flying over the river attached to a kite, and whether he’d “wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house” (50).