The Bible Salesman (12 page)

They were quiet for a few miles.

“I didn’t even look at the gas,” said Miss Sarah. “How much gas is in there? I can’t read the dial.”

Henry leaned over. “It’s about half full.” He felt a hope, an urgency, yeasting up. The ladies would drive off and leave him there with her. He could maybe get a kiss somehow and then the next time would be at night up at the motel, or somewhere, and . . . He’d kissed Amanda Dunn on two school hayrides in eighth grade, and then a few months later he’d kissed Gladys Fellpell — who everybody had kissed — coming home from the Fishertown skating rink in the bed of Mr. Dunn’s pickup. Gladys had told him right after the kiss that she loved him, and he was so nervous he told her he loved her too. He didn’t especially like her, though, because she wanted to talk all the time and had given him a skull ring that Aunt Dorie told him looked like it had something to do with the devil. After Gladys, Carson told him about Song of Solomon and the bra strap thing, and he’d had his three main girlfriends, Nan Faircloth, Dorothy Cox, and Betty Beal. And he’d discovered why Mrs. Long, the Latin teacher and counselor, told all the girls not to ever do heavy petting. It was because they got hot — and ready to do about anything, it looked like. But he’d saved himself. He’d promised Aunt Dorie.

After about an hour they passed the Night’s Rest Motel. “We need to turn in right there at that fruit stand,” he said. She’d made a new sign and changed the ect. to etc. He saw the scales — and Marleen under the tent all alone, exactly as he’d seen her over and over in his mind.

Marleen noticed the black car as it slowed, turned off the road, and pulled up too close to the squash. It sat there running. An old woman, it looked like, or a child, was driving. Instead of the engine just quitting, the car lurched backward and choked to a stop. Somebody getting out on the passenger side and . . . was it . . . ? She stood. “Henry?” It
was
Henry. Who were the old ladies? He’d brought his grandmas? Or he’d hitchhiked?

She walked out from under the tent, extended her hand, palm down, and said, “Hey, Henry. I’m so glad you’re back. I was hoping you might be.”

“Hey, Marleen. These ladies are driving into Atlanta and they want to meet you.” Marleen stood at the passenger window and Henry introduced them.

As they drove away, he said, “I was lucky to run up on them.”

“The one driving looked pretty old.”

“She was. Ninety-one.”

“Come on under the tent. What happened the other day?”

He explained about being called away, about the cabin camp on the Okaloga near Brownlee, then listened as she told about waiting for him. She was sure something had gone wrong. She wasn’t mad at all. She asked about the ladies. He told about his visit with them, that they were sisters, and about their stop at a service station and Miss Sarah thinking the man who pumped gas was one of her sons.

A car stopped, a family — man, woman, and two girls — got out, came in, and walked among the fruits and vegetables. They made their purchases and left, and Henry and Marleen talked again — this time about the family just there, guessing how old the two girls were, the man’s job, where they were from. Henry forgot God, country, Bibles, and FBI work. Marleen forgot her sister, the chickens to kill, the bookmobile. The shape of Marleen’s face, the texture of her voice, the laugh, her loveliness, all made themselves into a new form that Henry could almost feel with his hands, as real to him as the Jesus he’d once followed down the aisle at church. Already locked into Marleen’s memory were Henry’s long eyelashes, the unruly hair sticking up on the back of his head, the blood veins up from the arms, the long fingers, animated eyes, and his mother wit. She would write a poem about him.

They talked about aspirin and whether or not it actually stopped pain or covered it up. Henry said it just covered it up, that the pain was still there. Marleen said if you didn’t feel the pain then the pain was not there, since pain can’t happen until you feel it, even though the reason for the pain might be the very same as it was. Henry thought about it, said she was probably right.

Two men in dirty clothes drove up and bought two apples and a jar of jelly. They sat on the tailgate of their truck in the shade and ate. They’d brought along a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a couple of Big Top grape drinks.

Henry thought about “have,” “know,” and “that.” He explained how you sometimes couldn’t for sure talk about an object in some ways unless you knew which particular one it was so that you could say
that
one. Marleen was confused at first, but then said that many times
she had thought just about the very same thing
. Yes, you couldn’t make any real sense about certain kinds of tree things if you talked about trees in general. You needed to say
that
tree, and then talk about just one, where it was, where the first limb was, what had marked it up. Marleen had the concept down: “Sometimes generalizations don’t work,” she said.

Then Henry went to work on “have.” He described the differences between a woman having a baby and having a car and having a headache, yet it was all the same word. You could get rid of a car in a minute, but not a headache. And to have a baby meant give birth to. Why give so much work to one little word?

The DeSoto pulled in — the ladies, back to get him. Henry stood slowly. Marleen stood beside him, leaned into him just enough so that their shoulders touched. He was suffering some now. He thought about Clearwater. They were supposed to meet that night, weren’t they?

She put her arm behind him, tucked her thumb into the waist of his pants. He felt possessed by bright comfort. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. He placed a hand on her neck and kissed her lips.

“Oh, Henry,” she said, and placed her ear against his cheek.

He’d been run over by a moving mountain.

Back at Mrs. Finley’s, Henry stood in the yard and talked to Mrs. Finley for a while. Miss Sarah had said she had to get ready for bed. They talked about the weather and gardens, and Mrs. Finley invited him to come back anytime.

Henry walked down to the cabin camps and met Clearwater driving out the long driveway. The hot afternoon sun had dropped into the tops of trees across a wide field. Clearwater’s elbow was propped in the open window. “Sell any Bibles?”

“I sold a few. Won’t we supposed to meet tonight?”

“That’s tomorrow night. You couldn’t remember?”

“Well, no. I was thinking —”

“I said tomorrow night. Get that fruit stand out of your head. You haven’t been up there, have you?”

“No. Oh no. I been selling Bibles. Or trying to. Where you going?”

“I might drink a beer or two over at the truck stop, do some planning. See you later.”

Henry walked to the bank of the river, sat on the wall. It was not the river it had been yesterday. It was a new river in a new world. His new thoughts and feelings spilled, stumbled, tumbled over each other. He wanted to take Marleen to McGarren Island, to the mountains, show her things. He remembered the old man, the fiddle player, at Indian Springs, up in the mountains, sitting by the spring every day for an hour, playing songs, talking to people who came for water. He’d said the two big invisible life ingredients were hope and fear, and that people took doses of hope from the springs in their jars and jugs and sheepskins. That was when Henry had first arrived up there to sell Bibles, and the fiddler told him all about the history of the springs — the little boy who found it and realized next day that his sore throat was cured by the water, about all the other people cured. He remembered that the fiddle player said he didn’t believe in the water but believed in the hope that it made. He said fear was hope’s brother, that both could do bad and good things to people, just like water and liquor. He’d said water could rot wood and revive plants, and that liquor could rot marriages and revive storytelling. He wore a hat with sweat stains, and his fiddle had a .22 bullet hole in it. Sleeping on a cot in the tool shed behind the Indian Springs Hotel was when Henry got cold and realized he’d come to the mountains too early in the spring, and on leaving, met Clearwater. If he hadn’t met Clearwater, he realized, he wouldn’t have met Marleen.

Clearwater had decided to take his little pearl-handled .32 pistol with him to the truck stop and bar they’d passed on the way into the cabin camp. The last time he was in a bar alone, he’d needed a pistol and didn’t have it.

Six or eight tractor-trailers were parked in a large gravel lot near a service station with pumps out front for cars and pumps out back for trucks. Beyond the service station was a bar with a screened-in porch. A sign atop the bar said the supper club. A larger sign out front, beside the highway, said
OKALOGA TRUCK STOP AND RESTAURANT
, and below that was another sign:
ALL YOUR TRUCKING AND STOMACH NEEDS MET HERE
.

The lighting was dim inside the bar. He found a seat at a small table and was approached by an aproned woman with red-and-gray hair. “What can I get for you, honey?” she asked.

“How about a can of Schlitz.” It had been way too long. She was a little bit old. He would wait until they were up in Swan Island. They’d have those couple of days before picking up the truck and forklift. The boy had asked that they go up a few days early, and that was fine with him.

He’d brought his folder inside so he could study the plantation safe gig. There were maps and diagrams. Blinky was good about getting topographical maps to him. Clearwater marked a back road alternative, planned, and drank for over an hour. He checked his watch. He could stay and drink a fifth beer or head on home.

The waitress had disappeared on him, sort of, so he paid for his beers at the register and left through the door but returned and bought four to go.

He hadn’t driven far when he realized that one of his front tires — felt like the right one — was flat. A wagon trail turned off to the right. He turned in and parked in a clear area far enough back in the woods not to be seen. He opened the trunk and got out the spare tire and rolled it around to the front right tire, which was sure enough flat. He went back to the trunk for the jack. It wasn’t there. He’d never bothered to look — never imagined he’d need to bother to look. For the jack? What the hell? He’d just have to walk back there to that bar and get a jack, and he might as well steal one, because since he had the crowbar in the car, he could take that along and crack open a trunk with it. Any model jack would be okay. He could make it work. He’d mixed and matched before. He got a flashlight from the glove compartment.

He walked along the road back the way he’d come. Tall pines stood along both sides of the road. No cars coming either way. A bright moon, almost full, cast shadows.

He saw twinkles of truck-stop lights through the trees. He wondered if maybe the twinkles were blurry because of the beers he’d had. A car approached from ahead, and before it was close, he stepped over the road ditch, knelt, and dropped his head. He remembered the boy’s story about his daddy. No reason to be seen at a time like this. As he squatted he could feel the pistol tight against his butt. He rested both hands on the crowbar as if it were a cane.

When he rounded the last curve he saw the six or eight tractor-trailer rigs in the large parking lot between him and the truck stop. On his side of the rigs sat a lone automobile. Chevrolet, a ’48, it looked like. He stepped across the ditch and over a low wooden fence and walked up to the back of the car and stood there a minute. He placed the teeth of the crowbar into the lips of the trunk and pried once, got the teeth in further, and with a few quick jerks he had the trunk open. He stood for another moment, not moving, except for his eyes. Then he shined the light in the trunk and found the jack, got it, cut off the flashlight, stuck it in his pocket, eased the trunk lid down, and started back the way he’d come — cradling the jack and crowbar under his arm.

He heard a big rig truck door open, the closest one. Somebody yelled “Hey,” and he heard a cab door slam. How could that be? He should have checked the cab, should have looked in, knocked on the door. Stupid mistake. Somebody had been asleep in there. He kept walking at a steady pace. The man called “Hey” again. Clearwater didn’t look back. He switched the jack and crowbar from under his right arm to under his left, reached into his back pocket, pulled out the pistol and held it at his belt buckle. It was ready to fire — a bullet already jacked into the chamber. He just wanted to change a tire. Most other cars he’d have left behind. He heard the man running up behind him, breathing hard. He didn’t want any interference — couldn’t afford any. The man had made a huge mistake. Clearwater stopped, then turned around, the pistol just out of sight behind his leg.

“Where the hell you think you’re going with that?” said the man, glaring in the light of the moon. He grabbed the jack and jerked it to his side, knocking the crowbar to the ground, slapped Clearwater across the face. “You asshole,” the man said.

He’s not even aware of the crowbar, thought Clearwater. His face stung. Without speaking, he shot the man in the stomach. The man grunted, grabbed his stomach, then turned and faced the other way, his feet still planted as they had been, as if he couldn’t start his retreat. Clearwater shot him in the back of the head. He dropped. Clearwater’s upper lip was numb and his chin felt all tingly, not from the slap, but from what he’d just done. The man was facedown and moving a little, but he wouldn’t be moving long, Clearwater figured. He felt for the man’s billfold in the back left pocket, then back right pocket, where he found it. It was thick. He slid it down into his right front pocket. He looked all around to be sure nobody had seen.

He picked up the jack and trotted down the road until he was sure he was out of the line of sight from the truck stop. There was a good chance the trucks had blocked the sound of the pistol shots from the bar. It was just the little .32. He walked down the wagon path to the Chrysler. He was glad he’d thought to park off the main road. He set up the jack and changed the tire. His hands were shaking a little. He’d wait awhile, get the old tire fixed, and buy a new jack, maybe from a Chrysler dealer. Sometimes the police got lucky in putting two and two together. You couldn’t be too cautious.