The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (8 page)

It was printed that way in only one copy of the book,
Rebecca had said,
the copy you obviously found, God help us all.
A soul in a bottle.

There won’t be another Resurrection Man.

He made himself smile. “You’ve got a pen, you said.”

She reached thin fingers into the neck of her blouse and pulled out a long, tapering black pen. She shook it to dislodge a thin white tendril with a tiny green leaf on it. “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand.

She hesitated, then laid the pen in his palm.

He handed her the book, then pulled off the pen’s cap, exposing the gleaming, wedge-shaped nib. “Do you need to dip it in an ink bottle?” he asked.

“No, it’s got a cartridge in it. Unscrew the end.”

He twisted the barrel and the nib-end rotated away from the pen, and after a few more turns it came loose in his hand, exposing a duplicate of the ink-cartridge he had in his pocket.

“Pull the cartridge off,” she said suddenly, “and lick the end of it. Didn’t she tell you about my ink?”

“No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Tell me about your ink.”

“Well, it’s got a little bit of my blood in it, though it’s mostly ink.” She was flipping through the pages of the book. “But some blood. Lick it, the punctured end of the cartridge.” She looked up at him and grinned. “As a chaser for the rum I smell on your breath.”

For ten seconds he stared into her deep green eyes, then he raised the cartridge and ran his tongue across the end of it. He didn’t taste anything.

“That’s my dear man,” she said, taking his hand and stepping onto the living room carpet. “Let’s sit in that chair you were napping in.”

As they crossed the living room, Sydney slid his free hand into his pocket and clasped the rum-and-ink cartridge next to the blood-and-ink one. The one he had prepared this afternoon was up by his knuckles, the other at the base of his palm.

She let go of his hand to reach out and switch on the lamp, and Sydney pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and shook one free.

“Sit down,” she said, “I’ll sit in your lap. I hardly weigh anything. Are there limits to what you’d do for someone you love?”

Sydney hooked a cigarette onto his lip and tossed the pack aside. “Limits?” he said as he sat down and clicked a lighter at the end of the cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said around a puff of smoke.

“I think you’re not one of those normal people,” she said.

“I hate ‘em.” He laid his cigarette in the smoking stand beside the chair.

“Me too,” she said, and she slid onto his lap and curled her left arm around his shoulders. Her skirt and sleeve were damp, but not cold.

With her right hand she opened the book to the sonnet “To My Sister.”

“Lots of margin space for us to write in,” she said.

Her hot cheek was touching his, and when he turned to look at her he found that he was kissing her, gently at first and then passionately, for this moment not caring that her scent was the smell of crushed ants.

“Put the cartridge,” she whispered into his mouth, “back into the pen and screw it closed.”

He carefully fitted one of the cartridges into the pen and whirled the base until it was tight.

George Sydney stood up from crouching beside the shelf of cookbooks, holding a copy of James Beard’s
On Food.
It was his favorite of Beard’s books, and if he couldn’t sell it at a profit he’d happily keep it.

He hadn’t found any other likely books here today, and now it was nearly noon and time to walk across the boulevard to Boardner’s for a couple of quick drinks.

“There he is,” said the man behind the counter and the cash register. “George, this lady has been coming in every day for the last week, looking for you.”

Sydney blinked toward the brightly sunlit store windows, and in front of the counter he saw the silhouette of a short elderly woman with a halo of back-lit white hair.

He smiled and shuffled forward. “Well, hi,” he said.

“Hello, George,” she said in a husky voice, holding out her hand.

He stepped across the remaining distance and shook her hand. “What –” he began.

“I was just on my way to the Chinese Theater,” she said. She was smiling up at him almost sadly, and though her face was deeply etched with wrinkles, her green eyes were lively and young. “I’m going to lay three pennies in the indentations in Gregory Peck’s square.”

He laughed in surprise. “I do that with Jean Harlow!” “

That’s where I got the idea.” She leaned forward and tipped her face up and kissed him briefly on the lips, and he dropped the James Beard book.

He crouched to retrieve the book, and when he straightened up she had already stepped out the door. He saw her walking away west down Hollywood Boulevard, her white hair fluttering around her head in the wind.

The man behind the counter was middle-aged, with a graying moustache. “Do you know who your admirer is, George?” he asked with a kinked smile.

Sydney had taken a step toward the door, but some misgiving made him stop. He exhaled to clear his head of a sharp sweet, musty scent.

“Uh,” he said distractedly, “no. Who is she?”

“That was Cheyenne Fleming. I got her to sign some copies of her books the other day, so I can double the prices.”

“I thought she was dead by now.” Sydney tried to remember what he’d read about Fleming. “When was it she got paroled?”

“I don’t know. In the ‘80s? Some time after the death penalty was repealed in the ‘70s, anyway.” He waved at a stack of half a dozen slim dark books on the desk behind him. “You want one of the signed ones? I’ll let you have it for the original price, since she only came in here looking for you.”

Sydney looked at the stack.

“Nah,” he said, pushing the James Beard across the counter. “Just this.”

A few moments later he was outside on the brass-starred sidewalk, squinting after Cheyenne Fleming. He could see her, a hundred feet away to the west now, striding away.

He rubbed his face, trying to get rid of the odd scent. And as he walked away, east, he wondered why that kiss should have left him feeling dirty, as if it had been a mortal sin for which he couldn’t now phrase the need for absolution.

This story originated in my frustration that the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay died two years before I was born. The character Cheyenne Fleming deviated from Millay by becoming, I’m afraid, a much less interesting person than her original model – certainly poor Fleming’s sonnets can’t hold a candle (lit at both ends or not) to Millay’s! But then I think Millay was the best
sonnetist since Shakespeare, so I guess Fleming shouldn’t feel too bad.

It was an entertaining chore for me to write sonnets – one in the story, and three for inclusion in the limited edition from Subterranean Press – from the point of view of a fictional character, and so later I did it again with the protagonist of the novel
Three Days to Never.

The incident with the balloon man in the forecourt of the Chinese Theater really happened, and it was my wife who had the cigarette snatched from her mouth; the man was wearing a top hat, and she knocked it off. The used-book store, Book City, isn’t there anymore, unfortunately.

–T. P.

A gust of rainy wind wobbled the old 350 Honda as it made a right turn from Anaheim Boulevard into the empty parking lot, but the rider swerved a little wider to correct for it, and the green neutral-light shone under the water-beaded plastic window of the speedometer gauge as he coasted to a stop in one of the parking spaces in front of the anonymous office building.

He flipped down the kickstand and let the bike lean onto it without touching his shoe to the gleaming black pavement, and he unsnapped his helmet and pulled it off, shaking out his gray hair as he stared at the three-story building. In sunlight its white stucco walls were probably bright, but on this overcast noon it just looked ashen.

He shifted around on the plastic shopping bag he had draped over the section of black steel frame where the padded seat had once been, and squinted across the street. Past the wet cars hissing by in both directions he could see the bar, though it had a different name now. Probably the last person he knew from those days had quit going in there twenty years ago.

He looked back at the office building in front of him and tried to remember the Firehouse Pizza building that had stood there in 1975. It had sat further back, it seemed to him, with a wider parking lot in front.

The spot where he used to park his bike was somewhere inside this new building now.

He reached a gloved hand below the front of the gas tank and switched off the engine.

“Is he coming in?”

The bald man at the computer monitor stared at the red dot on the map-grid. “I don’t –”

“Look out the window,” said Hartford Evian with exaggerated clarity.

“Oh, right.” Scarbee got up from the computer and crossed to the tinted window that overlooked Anaheim Boulevard, and peered down. “He’s just sitting on his motorcycle, with his helmet off.” He rubbed his nose. “It’s raining.”

“Was this visit on the schedule?”

“I suppose so. Why should they show
me
the schedule? It must have been.”

Evian had flipped open a cell phone and begun awkwardly punching numbers into it, when Scarbee added, “Now Kokolo just drove in.”

Evian swore and quickly finished pushing the tiny buttons.

“Perry,” he said a moment later, “don’t look at the guy on the motorcycle to your right, it’s Hollis.
Hollis.
Yes, that one. It’s not on any schedule
I
ever saw. Just walk in, ignore him.” After listening for a moment, he went on, “Wait, wait! Felise is with you? Tell Felise not to get out of the car!”

Scarbee was still looking out the window. “Felise is already out of the car,” he said.

“Get in here, both of you, quick, don’t look around,” said Evian, and then he snapped the phone closed. “Did Hollis look at her?”

“Well,” said Scarbee, “he looked over at both of them.”

Evian opened his mouth as if to speak, hesitated, then said, “Call Hoag Hospital. We’ve got to get Lyle back here right now, not later today.”