The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (4 page)

Torrez opened his mouth, then just exhaled. He took a sip of Amelia’s rum and said, “She is?”

“Sure. We all know, when someone is. I guess they figured you wouldn’t bleed for her, if you wouldn’t bleed for me. Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.”

“Right, you said.”

“Can I have her rings? They’d fit on my head like crowns.” “I don’t know what became of her,” he said. It’s true, he realized, I don’t. I don’t even know what there was of her.

He looked at the doll and wondered why anyone kept such things.

His own Bible, on the mantel in the living room workshop, was relatively intact, though of course it was warped from having been soaked in holy water. He had burned out half a dozen verses from the Old Testament that had to do with witchcraft and wizards; and he had thought about excising “thou shalt not kill” from Exodus, but decided that if the commandment was gone, his career might be too.

After he had refused to ransom Amelia’s ghost, he had cut out Ezekiel 44:25 – “And they shall come at no dead person to defile themselves: but for father, or for mother, or for son, or for daughter, for brother, or for sister that hath had no husband, they may defile themselves.”

He had refused to defile himself – defile himself any further, at least

– for his own dead daughter. And so she had wound up helping to voice “bad prayers” out of a TV set somewhere.

The phone rang again, and this time he snatched up the receiver before the answering machine could come on. “Yes?”

“Mr. Torrez,” said a man’s voice. “I have a beaker of silence here, she’s twelve years old and she’s not in any jar or bottle.”

“Her father has been here,” Torrez said.

“I’d rather have the beaker that’s you. For all her virtues, her soul’s a bit thin still, and noises would get through.”

Torrez remembered stories he’d heard about clairvoyants driven to insanity by the constant din of thoughts.

“My daddy doesn’t play that anymore,” said Amelia. “He has me back now.”

Torrez remembered Humberto’s wave this morning. Torrez had waved back.

Torrez looked into the living room, at the current Bible in the burning rack, and at the books he still kept on a shelf over the cold fireplace

– paperbacks, hardcovers with gold-stamped titles, books in battered dust-jackets. He had found – what? – a connection with other people’s lives, in them, which since the age of eighteen he had not been able to have in any other way. But these days their pages might as well all be blank. When he occasionally pulled one down and opened it, squinting through his magnifying glass to be able to see the print clearly, he could understand individual words but the sentences didn’t cohere anymore. She’s like me.

I wonder if I could have found my way back, if I’d tried. I could tell her father to ask her to try.

“Bring the girl to where we meet,” Torrez said. He leaned against the kitchen counter. In spite of his resolve, he was dizzy. “I’ll have her parents with me to drive her away.”

I’m dead already, he thought. Her father came to me, but the book says he may do that for a daughter. And for me, the dead person, this is the only way left to have a vital connection with other people’s lives, even if they are strangers.

“And you’ll come away with me,” said the man’s voice.

“No,” said Amelia, “he won’t. He brings me rum and candy.”

The living girl who had been Amelia would have been at least somewhat concerned about the kidnapped girl. We each owe God our mind, Torrez thought, and he that gives it up today is paid off for tomorrow.

“Yes,” said Torrez. He lifted the coffee cup; his hand was shaky, but he carefully poured the rum over the cloth head of the doll; the rum soaked into its fabric and puddled on the counter.

“How much is the ransom?” he asked.

“Only a reasonable amount,” the voice assured him blandly.

Torrez was relieved; he was sure a reasonable amount was all that was left, and the kidnapper was likely to take it all anyway. He flicked his lighter over the doll, and then the doll was in a teardrop-shaped blue glare on the counter. Torrez stepped back, ready to wipe a wet towel over the cabinets if they should start to smolder. The doll turned black and began to come apart.

Amelia’s voice didn’t speak from the answering machine, though he thought he might have heard a long sigh – of release, he hoped.

“I want something,” Torrez said. “A condition.”

“What?”

“Do you have a Bible? Not a repaired one, a whole one?” “I can get one.”

“Yes, get one. And bring it for me.” “Okay. So we have a deal?”

The rum had burned out and the doll was a black pile, still glowing red here and there. He filled the cup with water from the tap and poured it over the ashes, and then there was no more red glow.

Torrez sighed, seeming to empty his lungs. “Yes. Where do we meet?”

I wrote this story after watching the movie
Man on Fire,
caught up with the idea of a kidnap negotiator who finds that he has somehow got to the point where he must sacrifice himself in order to free the victim. And I used my local San Bernardino neighborhood as a setting, which led inevitably to the peculiarly pragmatic Hispanic style of magic.

For the Subterranean Press limited edition I did several illustrations, and a reader at
Amazon.com
noted that I’m not a very good artist. Glancing at the limited edition, I was forced to agree. The reader of this book is fortunate that those illustrations haven’t been reproduced here!

–T P.

The forecourt of the Chinese Theater smelled of rain-wet stone and car exhaust, but a faint aroma like pears and cumin seemed to cling to his shirt-collar as he stepped around the clustered tourists, who all appeared to be blinking up at the copper towers above the forecourt wall or smiling into cameras as they knelt to press their hands into the puddled handprints in the cement paving blocks.

George Sydney gripped his shopping bag under his arm and dug three pennies from his pants pocket.

For the third or fourth time this morning he found himself glancing sharply over his left shoulder, but again there was no one within yards of him. The morning sun was bright on the Roosevelt Hotel across the boulevard, and the clouds were breaking up in the blue sky.

He crouched beside Jean Harlow’s square and carefully laid one penny in each of the three round indentations below her incised signature, then wiped his wet fingers on his jacket. The coins wouldn’t stay there long, but Sydney always put three fresh ones down whenever he walked past this block of Hollywood Boulevard.

He straightened up and again caught a whiff of pears and cumin, and when he glanced over his left shoulder there was a girl standing right behind him.

At first glance he thought she was a teenager – she was a head shorter than him, and her tangled red hair framed a narrow, freckled face with squinting eyes and a wide, amused mouth.

“Three
pennies?” she asked, and her voice was deeper than he would have expected.

She was standing so close to him that his elbow had brushed her breasts when he’d turned around.

“That’s right,” said Sydney, stepping back from her, awkwardly so as not to scuff the coins loose.

“Why?”

“Uh …” He waved at the cement square and then barely caught his shopping bag. “People pried up the original three,” he said. “For souvenirs. That she put there. Jean Harlow, when she put her handprints and shoe prints in the wet cement, in 1933.”

The girl raised her faint eyebrows and blinked down at the stone. “I never knew that. How did you know that?”

“I looked her up one time. Uh, on Google.”

The girl laughed quietly, and in that moment she seemed to be the only figure in the forecourt, including himself, that had color. He realized dizzily that the scent he’d been catching all morning was hers.

“Google?” she said. “Sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something. Are you always so nice to dead people?”

Her black linen jacket and skirt were visibly damp, as if she had slept outside, and seemed to be incongruously formal. He wondered if somebody had donated the suit to the Salvation Army place down the boulevard by Pep Boys, and if this girl was one of the young people he sometimes saw in sleeping bags under the marquee of a closed theater down there.

“Respectful, at least,” he said, “I suppose.”

She nodded. “‘Lo,’” she said, “‘some we loved, the loveliest and the best …’”

Surprised by the quote, he mentally recited the next two lines of the Rubaiyat quatrain –
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest, / Have drunk their cup a round or two before
– and found himself saying the last line out loud: “‘And one by one crept silently to Rest.’”

She was looking at him intently, so he cleared his throat and said, “Are you local? You’ve been here before, I gather.” Probably that odd scent was popular right now, he thought, the way patchouli oil had apparently been in the ‘60s. Probably he had brushed past someone who had been wearing it too, earlier in the day.

“I’m staying at the Heroic,” she said, then went on quickly, “Do you live near here?”

He could see her bra through her damp white blouse, and he looked away – though he had noticed that it seemed to be embroidered with vines.

“I have an apartment up on Franklin,” he said, belatedly.

She had noticed his glance, and arched her back for a moment before pulling her jacket closed and buttoning it. “‘ And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,’” she said merrily, “‘ So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.’”

Embarrassed, he muttered the first line of that quatrain: “‘Ah, with the grape my fading life provide … ”’

“Good idea!” she said – then she frowned, and her face was older. “No, dammit, I’ve got to go – but I’ll see you again, right? I like you.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up – and then she had briefly kissed him on the lips, and he did drop his shopping bag.

When he had crouched to pick it up and brushed the clinging drops of cold water off on his pants, and looked around, she was gone. He took a couple of steps toward the theater entrance, but the dozens of colorfully dressed strangers blocked his view, and he couldn’t tell if she had hurried inside; and he didn’t see her among the people by the photo booths or on the shiny black sidewalk.

Her lips had been hot – perhaps she had a fever.

He opened the plastic bag and peered inside, but the book didn’t seem to have got wet or landed on a corner. A first edition of Colleen Moore’s
Silent Star,
with a TLS, a typed letter, signed, tipped in on the front flyleaf. The Larry Edmunds Bookstore a few blocks east was going to give him fifty dollars for it.

And he thought he’d probably stop at Boardner’s afterward and have a couple of beers before walking back to his apartment. Or maybe a shot of Wild Turkey, though it wasn’t yet noon. He knew he’d be coming back here again, soon, frequently – peering around, lingering, almost certainly uselessly.

Still,
I’ll see you again,
she had said.
I like you.

Well, he thought with a nervous smile as he started east down the black sidewalk, stepping around the inset brass-rimmed pink stars with names on them, I like you too. Maybe, after all, it’s a rain-damp street girl that I can fall in love with.