The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2 page)

“You know, Powers,” he said eventually, “I’m always going to the doctor with a diagnosis all figured out, but I’ve always got it wrong. The doctor must think I’m nuts. When I walk in, he always just … sighs, and asks me what it is
now
that I think I’ve got.” Phil shook his head. “And then I’m lucky if there’s anything wrong with me at all.”

And one day when I was a teenager watching television, our Saint Bernard came blundering into the living room, having noticed, apparently for the first time, the TV’s voices and moving images. The dog sniffed at the screen, hurried around to the back of the set and sniffed there, pondered it all for a few seconds, and finally nodded and walked away.

Phil, and probably the dog too, were wrong in the conclusions they came to, but they both believed they had
figured something out.
Phil learned better – as he so often did – but the dog probably believed for the rest of his life that he had figured out the television.

In my stories I try to have plots – I try to set up apparently disconnected events and then make sense of them. Figure them out! I want my readers to be satisfied, like the St. Bernard, and not be left with an anticlimax, as Phil was.

Of course we can safely assume that the St. Bernard was wrong in whatever conclusion he came to, and of course Phil was fortunate that his conclusion was a mistake. Still, certainty is reassuring.

In the stories I most like to read, things eventually prove to make sense. The events might be outlandish, and the resolution might be as objectively impossible as a dog’s explanation of television, but it’s all presented sincerely, not ironically, not tongue-in-cheek. Loose ends are tied up. The writer has taken the characters and their concerns seriously, so I can too, and has shown how all the conflicts and oxymorons are reconciled.

Real life, of course, doesn’t provide this. Edward John Trelawny, whom I used as a character in my story “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” was a real historical person who compensated for the pointless shabbiness of his actual life by inventing a glamorous biography for himself, and eventually he even came to believe that well-plotted fiction himself.

I sympathize. Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see
sense
– not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober.)

Our inclination to look for sense in the world doesn’t, of course, prove that there’s any out there to be found. Being hungry doesn’t prove we have bread, as Matthew Arnold is supposed to have written.

But, as C. S. Lewis points out, being hungry does imply the existence of bread.

So I’m on the side of Phil Dick and the dog.

Across the highway was old Humberto, a dark spot against the tan field between the railroad tracks and the freeway fence, pushing a stripped-down shopping cart along the cracked sidewalk. His shadow still stretched halfway to the center-divider line in the early morning sunlight, but he was apparently already very drunk, and he was using the shopping cart as a walker, bracing his weight on it as he shuffled along. Probably he never slept at all, not that he was ever really awake either.

Humberto had done a lot of work in his time, and the people he talked and gestured to were, at best, long gone and probably existed now only in his cannibalized memory – but this morning as Torrez watched him the old man clearly looked across the street straight at Torrez and waved. He was just a silhouette against the bright eastern daylight – his camouflage pants, white beard and Daniel Boone coonskin cap were all one raggedly backlit outline – but he might have been smiling too.

After a moment’s hesitation Torrez waved and nodded. Torrez was not drunk in the morning, nor unable to walk without leaning on something, nor surrounded by imaginary acquaintances, and he meant to sustain those differences between them – but he supposed that he and Humberto were brothers in the trades, and he should show some respect to a player who simply had not known when to retire.

Torrez pocketed his Camels and his change and turned his back on the old man, and trudged across the parking lot toward the path that led across a weedy field to home.

He was retired, at least from the big-stakes dives. Nowadays he just waded a little ways out – he worked on cars and Bibles and secondhand eyeglasses and clothes people bought at thrift stores, and half of that work was just convincing the customers that work had been done. He always had to use holy water –
real
holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s – but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet. Still, it was better to err on the side of thoroughness.

His garage door was open, and several goats stood up with their hoofs on the fence rail of the lot next door. Torrez paused to pull up some of the tall, furry, sage-like weeds that sprang up in every stretch of unattended dirt in the county, and he held them out and let the goats chew them up. Sometimes when customers arrived at times like this, Torrez would whisper to the goats and then pause and nod.

Torrez’s Toyota stood at the curb because a white Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway. Torrez had already installed a “pain button” on the Dodge’s dashboard, so that when the car wouldn’t start, the owner could give the car a couple of jabs –
Oh yeah? How do you like this, eh?
On the other side of the firewall the button was connected to a wire that was screwed to the carburetor housing; nonsense, but the stuff had to look convincing.

Torrez had also used a can of Staples compressed air and a couple of magnets to try to draw a babbling ghost out of the car’s stereo system, and this had not been nonsense – if he had properly opposed the magnets to the magnets in the speakers, and got the Bernoulli effect with the compressed air sprayed over the speaker diaphragm, then at speeds over forty there would no longer be a droning imbecile monologue faintly going on behind whatever music was playing. Torrez would take the Dodge out onto the freeway today, assuming the old car would get up to freeway speeds, and try it out driving north, east, south and west. Two hundred dollars if the voice was gone, and a hundred in any case for the pain button.

And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.

He pushed open the front door of the house – he never locked it – and made his way to the kitchen to get a beer out of the cold spot in the sink. The light was blinking on the telephone answering machine, and when he had popped the can of Budweiser he pushed the play button.

“Give Mr. Torrez this message,” said a recorded voice. “Write down the number I give you! It is important, make sure he gets it!” The voice recited a number then, and Torrez wrote it down. His answering machine had come with a pre-recorded message on it in a woman’s voice –
No one is available to take your call right now –
and many callers assumed the voice was that of a woman he was living with. Apparently she sounded unreliable, for they often insisted several times that she convey their messages to him.

He punched in the number, and a few moments later a man at the other end of the line was saying to him, “Mr. Torrez? We need your help, like you helped out the Fotas four years ago. Our daughter was stolen, and now we’ve got a ransom note – she was in a coffee pot with roses tied around it –”

“I don’t do that work anymore,” Torrez interrupted, “I’m sorry. Mr. Seaweed in Corona still does – he’s younger – I could give you his number.”

“I called him already a week ago, but then I heard you were back in business. You’re better than Seaweed –”

Poor old Humberto had kept on doing deep dives. Torrez had done them longer than he should have, and nowadays couldn’t understand a lot of the books he had loved when he’d been younger.

“I’m not back in that business,” he said. “I’m very sorry.” He hung up the phone.

He had not even done the ransom negotiations when it had been his own daughter that had been stolen, three years ago – and his wife had left him over it, not understanding that she would probably have had to be changing her mentally retarded husband’s diapers forever afterward if he had done it.

Torrez’s daughter Amelia had died at the age of eight, of a fever. Her grave was in the dirt lot behind the Catholic cemetery, and on most Sundays Torrez and his wife had visited the grave and made sure there were lots of little stuffed animals and silver foil pinwheels arranged on the dirt, and for a marker they had set into the ground a black plastic box with a clear top, with her death-certificate displayed in it to show that she had died in a hospital. And her soul had surely gone to Heaven, but they had caught her ghost to keep it from wandering in the noisy, cold half-world, and Torrez had bound it into one of Amelia’s cloth dolls. Every Sunday night they had put candy and cigarettes and a shot-glass of rum in front of the doll – hardly appropriate fare for a little girl, but ghosts were somehow all the same age. Torrez had always lit the cigarettes and stubbed them out before laying them in front of the doll, and bitten the candies: ghosts needed somebody to have
started
such things for them.

And then one day the house had been broken into, and the little shrine and the doll were gone, replaced with a ransom note:
If you want your daughter’s ghost back, Mr. Torrez, give me some of your blood.
And there had been a phone number.

Usually these ransom notes asked the recipient to get a specific tattoo that corresponded to a tattoo on the kidnapper’s body – and afterward whichever family member complied would have lost a lot of memories, and be unable to feel affection, and never again dream at night. The kidnapper would have taken those things. But a kidnapper would always settle instead for the blood of a person whose soul was broken in the way that Torrez’s was, and so the robbed families would often come to Torrez and offer him a lot of money to step in and give up some of his blood, and save them the fearful obligation of the vampiric tattoo.