The Bible Salesman (14 page)
“Yeah, take her a bunch of bumper stickers. I want to hear about it, but wait, just watch this. We stopped at nine stores on the way down here — I just stopped at ones on the right side of the road ’cause I knew we didn’t have time to stop at them all. That way I could remember. It added some time to the trip, but we sold three hundred bumper stickers easy as pie. That’s thirty dollars in one day, not even trying. Do you realize that that’s over ten thousand dollars in one year? Ten thousand dollars, on bumper stickers? Let’s see — thirty, thirty, nine hundred, nine thousand, two times nine hundred, eighteen hundred. That’s ten thousand eight hundred dollars in one year.”
They pulled into a service station, the parking area covered with rocks and bottle caps.
“But it’ll have to be more than just driving back and forth to the beach,” said Henry, “and you’re not going to sell any on Sundays, and you just might have got lucky here at first. Beginner’s luck. Selling Bibles, I can tell you, it really comes and goes. Oh, I’ve got to tell you about this cat with a tooth stuck through a copperhead’s head.”
They were inside the Gulf station.
“Wait a minute,” whispered Carson. “Watch.”
The store owner, a man with his arm in a sling, bought forty bumper stickers. Twenty jesus saves, and ten each of the other two.
Back in the car and on the road, Carson said, “That’s the way it is everywhere. Now, what about this woman?”
Henry told Carson about Marleen.
Carson wanted to know if he got into her pants.
Henry told him no, but that he probably would before long.
“
What
? You probably
will
?”
“I don’t know. I’ve changed my ideas about a lot of things.”
“What happened?”
“I started reading the Bible.”
When they arrived at the homeplace, Aunt Dorie sat waiting on the front doorstep. She stood slowly, a big smile on her face. As Henry walked toward her, she said, “I’d run to meet you if it won’t for my foot.” They hugged, and she sat and patted the step beside her. Henry sat. Carson parked himself in a metal lawn chair close by. Dorie held Henry’s hand in her lap. “I want you to tell me what-all you been doing. It must be pretty fine, and Carson, you’re going to have to do something about the phone. It’s been ringing off the hook. People wanting more of them bumper stickers. There it goes right now.”
Carson jumped up. “This is something like wildfire,” he said.
“Where’s Uncle Samuel?” Henry asked Aunt Dorie.
“He’s in Raleigh. He’ll be back before supper. He’s so good to me, Henry.”
“I’m glad.”
Caroline sat and talked with this older friend of her brother’s about the Grand Ole Opry, about Roy Acuff, whom he knew, Red Foley, whom he’d met, about schoolteaching, which Caroline was doing, first grade, about his first school principal, his armed service experience in France, about Russia getting an atomic bomb, the possibility of war in Korea, and about losing a child, before he lost his wife. He seemed kind and asked her question after question about her teaching, and while he asked, it came to her that Glenn never asked those kinds of questions. It also came to her that he looked like Clark Gable, for sure. Henry had mentioned him in his letters, but not how handsome he was. He seemed like a man who had been places, but was also kind and thoughtful. They got to talking about their favorite songs and he, off-key, sang a few lines of “Sentimental Journey.” They both laughed. Glenn loved her in his own way, but he’d yet to say “I love you.” His word was “care.” He’d been needy and eager in a sexual way, and she finally gave in. Though she knew it was wrong, it was somehow difficult to back out of it, avoid it — Glenn was unpleasant when she tried to talk about waiting. And how in the world had it turned out that she was sitting on the beach with this kind man who was talking to her, the sun going down, time suspended? Where were the boys?
When she got back to her room — Preston had offered to take her to dinner, and there was no reason to say no — there was a note on the door. Carson had called and would call back.
During supper with Carson, Aunt Dorie, and Uncle Samuel, Henry explained what little he could about his secret job. He wished Uncle Jack were there.
He talked a lot about Bible selling, the lessons he’d learned from Mr. Fletcher, and how they’d panned out. He told the cat-snake story. He talked about Indian Springs, the hotel there, the fiddle player, how people visited from all over.
He got the latest news about Aunt Ruth, Uncle Delbert, others in the family. And Aunt Dorie made him promise he’d come home for a while as soon as possible.
While they sat around the table after the meal, Uncle Samuel asked Henry what was the most important thing he’d learned in the last few months.
“It looks like I learned today to get in the bumper sticker business.”
“Well, I guess as long as it’s Christian bumper stickers,” said Uncle Samuel. “Yep, it looks like he might be onto something.”
Henry imagined Uncle Jack talking about bumper stickers — his chin tucked into his neck, the way he would sit back on the back two legs of his chair.
“Have you-all been down to Swan Island anytime lately?” Henry asked Uncle Samuel and Aunt Dorie.
They hadn’t.
“The Electra that used to be so nice is plumb run-down,” he said. He wanted to remember aloud about the time they went with Uncle Jack, but knew not to.
“I think,” said Carson, “if we wait to go back till tomorrow morning we could stop at some churches. Some of the big ones that might have an office or a preacher house next door.”
“Parsonage,” said Aunt Dorie, and then to Henry, “Did you get to spend any time with Caroline?”
“Just a few minutes. Mr. Clearwater, the man I was telling you about, was talking to her when we left.”
“Oh. How old is Mr. Clearwater?” said Aunt Dorie.
“I don’t know. Maybe forty. What would you say, Carson?”
“Something like that. Pretty old.”
“He was in the war,” said Henry. Then he understood. “Oh no, he’s way too old for her. And somehow I don’t think he’s all that interested in women. I mean, I don’t mean he’s a fairy or anything, but he just . . . I think he had a wife and a bad marriage a long time ago, something like that. I didn’t get to ask Caroline about Glenn. Are they still going out?”
“I think Glenn will come to his senses and ask her to marry him before the summer’s over,” said Uncle Samuel. “I’ve more or less pushed him to make a move before he gets too ugly to marry.” He laughed and looked around. “And I’ve helped him out with his business school.”
“I guess they’re almost engaged,” said Aunt Dorie. “Shouldn’t you-all try again to call her? We’re all through eating, it looks like.”
Carson phoned the hotel, asked for Caroline, and after a minute, talked to her, told her that over half the stores they’d stopped at on the way down had called to say they wanted more bumper stickers. They could make some quick money by waiting until the next morning to come back and take care of all the reorders.
She said that that would be fine, that she might take a walk on the beach, for them not to worry, and not to speed on the way down in the morning.
Then Henry called Marleen’s sister’s phone. This was the night. Friday. Between nine and ten. Marleen’s sister, Tina, answered. A baby was crying. She was expecting his call and talked to him a minute — the boy she’d “heard so much about.” Marleen came to the phone, and Henry, just inside the closed pantry door for privacy, felt the pantry become a kind of hallowed place. He looked at a row of canned tomatoes, one jar at a time, the “Ball” imprint standing out, the jars reflecting the lightbulb in the pantry ceiling. He listened to news, told his, and waited through one or two awkward silent spells. He told her about Swan Island, the bad condition of the Electra, the mattress on the steps. She told him about her grandma’s fall, her daddy’s hernia.
“I’ll call you next Friday, same time, same place,” he said. “But I’ll probably be at a coin phone, with a lot of nickels and dimes. You’ll be there, right?”
“I’ll be here,” said Marleen.
“Well . . .” Maybe she would say something that could kind of get them started to saying good-bye. “Bye until next week, then,” he said.
“Good-bye. Be sure to call me, now.”
“Bye. I will.”
“Bye.”
“. . . Bye.”
“. . . Good-bye . . .”
Before they went to bed Henry and Carson played carom and listened to
The Country Squire Show
on the radio, then Henry looked on the back table in the garage and found his cast net. In their bedroom after lights-out he and Carson talked about Korea. Carson said if a war happened it probably wouldn’t last long because America had atom bombs and the North Koreans and Chinese didn’t.
Caroline told Preston about her visit to the Electra when she was fourteen, about Aunt Dorie not wanting to dance. About the moon — and telling about that moon helped usher a kind of sea smoke into her heart, just as he, with his fingers, started at her wrist and continued on down toward her fingertips, a gentle, soft touching, and she, involuntarily almost, reached to the tie at his chest, grasped it, and as he kissed her, she moved her hand down the length of it — as if holding her fingers around the stems of flowers — feeling and hearing a voice say that all this had been ordained before stars were born.
On Monday morning, Henry said good-bye to Carson and Caroline — she acted funny the whole time they were at the beach. Then at Johnson and Ball Construction and Industrial Machine Repair Company over in McNeill, the place Blinky ran, or pretended to run, Henry learned to drive and manage a forklift and a dump truck. A man named Skinny, with orange-framed glasses, was his teacher. The FBI had connections that he’d never dreamed of.
Just over the first bridge outside McNeill was a turnoff onto a narrow dirt road that crossed a small bridge over a creek. The creek appeared to run from the channel to a large pond. Henry had a notion. He turned the big lumbering dump truck onto the side road and stopped. Clearwater pulled in behind him. Carson had stuck a “Jesus Saves” bumper sticker on the front bumper of the Chrysler and said he was going to order ten thousand more.
Henry reached for his cast net in a bucket in the floorboard and climbed down from the cab. He walked to Clearwater’s car window. “Get out. I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“How to throw a cast net. You can show me how to light a match in a thirty-knot wind. Mr. Blinky never did. Remember?”
“We need to get on the road.”
“That gig’s not till next Sunday. We got all kinds of time.”
“Something might come up.”
“Aw, come on.”
Clearwater got out, and Henry walked him over to the bridge, then down an embankment, until they stood beside the creek.
“Okay,” said Henry. “You take in the cord like this, shake it so all the weights are clear, and then catch it at about one-third of the way down and pick up a weight from down here, hold it here, and then get you another weight and spread out the net, and you’re ready to go, see, and then you just stare out there for a little ripple that says ‘finger mullet,’ and if you don’t see one you can throw blind. You’ve got to spin your right hand when you fling it, and so you go like this.” Henry flung the net and it opened into a circle, landed, sank into the water. He started pulling in, hand over hand. As the bunched net got close he saw the silver minnow sides flashing, reflecting sky light. He thought of the disciples. “Okay, okay, we got a few. See. That was easy. Pull it up and then just grab this here to unpucker it in the bucket, like this, shake it, pull it up, and the fish fall out. You want to try it?”
Clearwater didn’t know what to do. He took the net. He cast a few times, with Henry talking him through the process. No luck.
They started up the bank to the bridge.
“Now you got to teach me that match-lighting trick,” said Henry. “Thirty-knot wind.”
Clearwater took a deep breath. He reached into his shirt pocket for a box of matches. The morning sun was just coming from behind clouds.
“Okay. Put the match between your first and second finger, like this. Then you strike it, see? Like that, and cup your hand, and bring your other hand in so no air comes up from below or from either side. See?”
“Yessir.”
“Blinky says it works in a wind up to thirty knots. Try it a few times without striking it. That’s what he makes people do. . . . Okay. Good. Almost. Good. Now, see, you got to get your other hand in there — the heel of your other hand right up against here. . . . There you go. Good. Good. Now try striking one.”
Henry lit the match, curved his fingers around the flame, brought in his other hand, cradling, like he might cradle a lightning bug.
Late that evening the dump truck, Chrysler following, passed houses whose interior lights, yellow through shades, or white through windows, had just come on or were coming on. Clearwater thought about having Caroline inside one of those houses, in the living room maybe, just kind of knocking things around. All that hard breathing, coming on so quick. She’d never once mentioned the name Glenn, from the very beginning, the one Henry said was her boyfriend. Available ones never mentioned husband or sweetheart names. Unavailable ones did. He would look her up again sometime — even a good ways down the line.
Just outside Jemson, Georgia, it started raining, a slow drizzle. Henry sighted a service station with a shelter and pulled in for gas and a drink. As he stepped around the back of the dump truck, he glanced at the front bumper of the Chrysler, stopped, gasped, closed his eyes, not wanting to believe, opened them again to see the tiny red and black rivers of ink and rainwater running down and off the bumper sticker and onto the chrome bumper, very little left of jesus saves. But holding on at the bottom in small, proud print: “Carson’s Premier Printing, Simmons, N.C., phone 6-5912.”
GENESIS
A
drop of water from Uncle Jack’s finger fizzed in the frying pan. “Put on your coat and hat,” he said to Henry, “and bring me in a bucket of stove wood.” He turned the bacon slices with a fork, one at a time. Grease bubbled beneath them. Outside, darkness was dissolving into gray light.
