The Bible Salesman

by Clyde Edgerton

  “Yessir.”

  “Guitar.”

  “You still play?”

  “I quit.”

  “Why?”

  “I just did. It wadn’t very profitable.”

  “Where’s Knoxville?”

  “Knoxville, Tennessee. You don’t know Knoxville is in Tennessee?”

  “I didn’t take any geography for some reason,” said Henry. He was eating a banana. He thought about Marleen. She would know. “I know all about Hank Williams, though.”

  Clearwater had trouble with the way Henry peeled only an inch or so of the banana, then nibbled. And how could somebody with their head out their ass not know about Roy Acuff? “Why don’t you just peel the whole thing and eat it?”

  Henry rolled down the window and threw out his banana peel. “That’s just the way I do it. I don’t like to touch the thing itself.”

  They were driving by a wide, bare field that seemed snow-white under the full moon now high in the sky. Henry didn’t see how he could talk about Marleen. He was going to be a perfect assistant to Mr. Clearwater, quiet and obedient, and then he’d sure enough have a big job. He could probably go back to Washington, DC, for meetings and stuff. He’d only been the one time — with the safety patrol in the eighth grade.

  They stopped for a blinking red light, just south of New Bilbow, Georgia. The radio news said the Night Shooter had just shot another motorist between the eyes up somewhere in North Carolina. They still hadn’t caught him.

  “Turn in there and let’s get a bite to eat,” said Clearwater.

  Henry turned into the parking lot of the Piggy Pot Diner.

  “You want a nip of whiskey?” asked Clearwater.

  “Sure.”

  Inside, they waited at their table for food. Clearwater said, “I met that guy, the Night Shooter, right before he escaped.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Skipper Thurston was all I ever heard.”

  “How’d you know him?”

  “I met him in the county jail in Thomasville, Georgia. When I had to put some people in jail down there.” Clear-water visualized the glasses, the face, the teeth, his look when you were talking to him, a look that said he was somewhere else, not there. “He was a trusty back then. I talked to him for a little bit.” Clearwater remembered how the Night Shooter didn’t want you to see how his hand shook when he held something.

  “What was he like?”

  “Not what you’d think. He was kind of nervous. He had real fine teeth. He reminded me of my mama in a funny way. Kind of sensitive or something. Short fuse.”

  “My granddaddy had false teeth,” said Henry. “Me and my sister spent the night over there one time, and I got his false teeth out of a glass of water and put them in my mouth over top of mine. They fit right over my teeth, and everybody laughed except Pa D. That was his nickname. At first he didn’t even recognize them. Aunt Dorie did, though. And Aunt Dorie was always telling me to take care of widows and orphans because it was in the Bible. Kind of like your mama, I guess. She’d send me to take blankets down to this widow woman that lived down below us. She had a retarded son and about a hundred cats. That could talk.”

  “The son?”

  “The cats. The widow was Mrs. Albright, and she’d throw her voice to the cats. Especially around kids, but she’d do it by herself too, sitting out on her porch.”

  The waitress, wearing a white apron and a white paper hat, walked up with a plate in each hand, looking at one, then the other. “Who had the pork chops?”

  “I did,” said Henry.

  When she walked away, Henry said the blessing. “Dear God, for these and all thy blessings we are grateful. Amen.”

  Clearwater looked at him while he prayed. He’d keep him for a while. “There’s this cabin camp we can stop at for a few days. Up in Brownlee, on the Okaloga River. You’ll get to meet Blinky. He’s an old buddy. He spent some time with me and Roy Acuff. We had some good times. Then he got recruited by the FBI too, and he pretends he’s running this company up in McNeill.”

  “And we’ll have a few days off?”

  “That’s right.”

  Marleen, Marleen. Marleen Green.

  “Did Blinky play an instrument?” asked Henry.

  “Naw. He was a promoter. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  The next morning, as they passed through Stint, Georgia, Henry mailed two postcards:

  Dear Aunt Dorie, This postcard picture is where I just stayed. I’m having some real adventures. I’ve got a new job except I’m still selling Bibles too. I can tell you about it when I see you. I’m working with a real nice man. I have been staying true to God, spreading his holy word, and have been praying faithfully. Tell Caroline I’ll write her a letter next time. Out of room.

  Truly yours,

  Henry

  Dear Carson, How are you. I am doing fine. I’m in on a deal. I can’t tell you anything about it though. Let’s just say it has something to do with the government and is pretty interesting, and I’m working with this man who is really smart. I don’t know when I’ll get home. We might do some work up at McNeill and Swan Island, though. I’ll let you know when. Out of room to write.

  Your cuz,

  Henry

  At the Okaloga River Cabin Camp, Henry sat on a rock wall along the outside of a bend that brought water straight toward him and then took it away. The river was swollen from rains and brought debris from upriver. He was thinking about two things: Marleen and the Bible. He’d been reading a Bible lately that was different from the Bible he’d been reading growing up. And the one he was now reading was the real one. He’d only dip-read the first one. That dip-reading had something to do with the big problem he had now, he was thinking. The big bright cloud that was his belief, delivered by the Bible and Sunday school and Antioch Baptist Church and Preacher Gibson and Aunt Dorie, seemed smaller and less white than it once was.

  That night, sitting on his screened-in porch with a lamp cord through his window, he read into the New Testament, looking for stories about wine and sin. He read verses about sin in the books of Acts and Timothy, and figured out that the wine Jesus was drinking was not grape juice or they would have called it that. Grape juice wouldn’t have been making people drunk. People had called Jesus a drunk. Where was that? Matthew 11:19. Why was that in the Bible? Jesus was drinking wine for sure. He made it hisself. No reason to think it was grape juice, unfermented, like Preacher Gibson said. It was okay for him to have a drink with Mr. Clearwater. All those people getting drunk in the Old Testament. There had been so many of them. Were Henry’s thoughts about women and girls and all that, were they sin? Just his thoughts about it? Well, Jesus said it was, it looked like, so he’d gotten to looking for stuff that Jesus said, and he came up in Matthew 19:12 on that about somebody being born a eunuch. That had to be a fairy because a eunuch was a castrated man. Why had Jesus told all about a fairy and not had a problem with it?

  Then he read in Timothy 2:14 that Adam wasn’t responsible for sin, but he remembered differently. So he went searching. First Timothy 2:14 said, “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”

  He turned straight back to Genesis and found that God blamed both of them and the snake too, which was supposed to be the devil in disguise, but what the actual snake had to do with it wasn’t clear, but he got punished, and that couldn’t make sense, any sense at all, because animals didn’t reason things through like people. The snake hadn’t had a chance, hadn’t had a choice, and then it said that Adam would return to dust. Why wouldn’t he go to heaven or hell? That’s where everybody went, wasn’t it? Nobody just returned to dust, did they? Was there not a heaven when Adam was alive? Wait, in Genesis 1:1 God created heaven and earth; so there was a heaven when he told Adam he was going back to dust, but God hadn’t created hell. Did he create hell? It didn’t say so. Did he just think about it down the line? That didn’t sound like somebody “all-knowing.” And there was th
e “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever” in the Old Testament — that was heaven, wasn’t it? Another problem was that you couldn’t dwell in the house of the Lord like David said he would without accepting Jesus, but Jesus hadn’t been born yet. How was that supposed to work out? Why hadn’t any of this been handled in church, where it ought to have been handled? Was it a secret? Did Caroline know? Did Carson know? “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .” Now this seemed almost like it was about a different kind of God. The Lord. The Lord seemed kind of like a mama might be.

  He couldn’t now — in a prayer — get beyond the words “Dear God.” He thought to pray to Jesus instead of God. “Dear Jesus, please guide and direct me. Please answer my prayer. Please give me some kind of understanding about what’s wrote down in the Bible.”

  He thought about Marleen. Marleen, Marleen. Marleen Green. He thought about walking over to Mr. Clearwater’s door, knocking, and when he came to the door, saying, “Ma’am, I’ve got something real pretty in a little box here I’d like to show you if you wouldn’t mind me coming in just a minute,” and maybe Clearwater would laugh. And then Henry could ask him if he could borrow his car. Naw. It wouldn’t work. He’d better not. Clearwater probably wouldn’t even laugh. He looked like Clark Gable with big ears, but he acted kind of like . . . President Truman. Not very juicy at all.

  Blinky Smathers was five feet tall — five feet even. He usually wore a little flat British hat with a top that flopped forward onto the short bill. His big red face was square, his eyebrows came together in the middle, and his eyes bulged out. He didn’t talk — rather, he barked, hoarsely. As if he were six feet tall, he strode toward Clearwater, grabbed his hand, reached up, slapped him on the shoulder, and growled, “It’s good to see you, Bucky. On the muddy Okaloga. I got a hour or two.” Another man, wearing sunglasses, sat in the open driver’s door of Blinky’s Cadillac, picking at a wildflower, letting the pieces drop one by one.

  “Is he going to stay in the car?” asked Clearwater.

  “He’s not the talky type.”

  In a few minutes, Blinky and Clearwater faced each other, sitting in rocking chairs on the small porch of Clearwater’s cabin.

  “Do you want me to send you somebody to help you out?” asked Blinky. “Or do you want to keep the boy for these next two?”

  “He’s okay. So far.”

  “You know I’d like to do it myself, but I just can’t afford to get mixed up in it no more.”

  “I know,” said Clearwater.

  “Too much to look after. Way too busy.”

  “Yeah, I know, and it’s getting bigger all the time, ain’t it?”

  “Oh yeah. I want you up at the top with me, Bucky, right there beside me — just like in that first jeep.” Blinky held up the freshly lit tip of his cigar and looked at it. “You remember that — you riding my back so we wouldn’t have but one set of footprints?”

  “Of course I remember it.”

  “God, what fun. If they paid any attention to them footprints in that mud, they said, ‘Whoa. That was one heavy son of a bitch.’ Huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now. Okay — this new stuff, two safes, I’m keeping off the sheets. I can do that every once in a while. Just you and me and Teddy Lamont know about it. You remember Teddy. He’s the mole on this first gig, close to Panakala, Florida, at a plantation. I’ve drawn up a rough plan. You can smooth it out. A Sunday morning gig. Teddy will have some women in on it Saturday night for the hired hands around there. He’s assured me the coast’ll be clear. We’ll have to take the whole safe — with a forklift and dump truck — or at least you’ll have the forklift if you need it. The safe’s full of secret compartments. We’re lucky to have that truck and forklift, Bucky. They’ve come in handy. The mark, a Greenlove out of New York, you may have heard of him, will never report it missing. He can’t afford to. We know that. I’ll take a train down here to see the family. You’ll deliver the safe to me — right here at the cabin camp — and I’ll drive it back in the truck, get it open at the plant. You can follow me up there if you want to. But you know you can trust me. We’ll do a sixty-forty split. You decide what you want to pay the boy.”

  “Sixty-forty which way?”

  Blinky laughed. “Aw, Bucky. You’re still funny. Still funny. Now, the second gig is just as big, I think, but different. A doctor. We don’t need the safe. Just what’s in it. You can decide how to get him to open it. Straight job. The G-boys are about to start an investigation. Down in Drain. But the doc don’t know they’re after him. You know Drain?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “The truck and forklift is already scheduled for you to pick up in McNeill.” Blinky handed Clearwater a folder. “It’s all in there. Get up there early and spend a little time on Swan Island. Nice beaches.”

  “What’s the doctor’s name — in Drain?” asked Clear-water.

  “Criddenton. Loaded. Absolutely. He’s got guys coming in from all over for face operations, bullet removal, on and on. Does abortions.”

  Henry, walking from a shower in the bathhouse, saw the Cadillac and knew it must be Blinky’s. Somebody was in the driver’s seat and somebody on Clearwater’s porch. If there was some way he could get a ride with these guys up to Jeffries, maybe . . . No, he’d better not ask about that. He needed to act right since Blinky was higher up than Clearwater. The guy in the driver’s seat didn’t seem like the FBI. He seemed like a truck driver with a suit and tie. He wouldn’t even look up.

  On the porch, Blinky grabbed Henry’s hand, reached up, slapped him on the shoulder. “So this is the young man I’ve heard so much about,” he growled. “We’re proud of all you’re doing for us. Cigar?” His lower eyelids were red, like a hound dog’s.

  “Thank you,” said Henry. “My uncle used to smoke Rum Crooks.”

  “Good cigar,” said Blinky. “Cheap, but good.” He glanced at Clearwater, slapped Henry on the shoulder again. “Right?”

  It wasn’t a question — it was a command of some sort. FBI? Blinky wasn’t what he’d pictured.

  Henry took the cigar handed him, and then the box of kitchen matches Blinky offered from his pants pocket. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I like a big match,” said Blinky. “Anybody ever show you how to light a match in a thirty-knot wind?”

  “Nosir.”

  “Well, before I leave out of here, I’ll teach you. Or if I forget, you get Bucky there to show you. Mr. Clearwater. You can still do it, can’t you, Bucky?”

  “Sure can.”

  Bucky? thought Henry. Bucky? Well, of course. They’re undercover agents.

  “We had a sergeant,” said Blinky. “Sergeant Dunlevel, that taught us, huh, Bucky?”

  “Right.”

  “Dunlevel would as soon hit you upside the head as look at you. Pull up that chair,” he said to Henry. “We’ve got a couple of unusual jobs coming up. Mr. Hoover is very interested. We’re basically dismantling the criminal element of the East Coast of the United States — from the inside. There’ll be some reward in it for you down the line — in more ways than one. And I understand you’re a Christian?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What denomination?”

  “Baptist.”

  “Baptist. Ah, Baptist. Sweet word. Baptist. You ever heard of ‘Between the Sheets’?”

  “No sir.”

  “Add ‘Between the Sheets’ to the name of a hymn. ‘I Surrender All . . . Between the Sheets.’ ”

  Henry caught on, laughed. “ ‘Love Lifted Me Between the Sheets.’ ”

  “That’s it,” barked Blinky. “There’s some good ones.” He looked at Clearwater, who was smiling with half his mouth. “You go to church, don’t you, Bucky?”

  “Not much,” said Clearwater.

  “I was raised upstream,” said Blinky to Henry, pointing his cigar. “Come down here from North Carolina once in a while to visit the family. Mr. Hoover appreciates
the work you’re doing for us, son. This is going to be big when it breaks. But listen.” He took a puff, blew a smoke ring that rolled up toward the ceiling. He looked at Henry kind of hard. “Don’t tell nobody what you’re doing. Nobody. That would be unwise.” He looked out at the Cadillac like he’d heard something. “I got to get on the road. You boys keep up the good work. It’s an important mission.” He stood, turned, looked at Henry. “This gig down in Florida — big fish, big fish. We’ve got to get the goods on this guy before we arrest him. We arrest him now, our whole operation falls through. We get his goods, he’ll think one of his rivals done it and then . . . well, then we’re sowing seeds of discord. Huh?” He raised his eyebrows, smiled. “ ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Between the Sheets’? Huh?” He lifted his hand with the cigar, headed for his Cadillac and driver. “Stay out of trouble, boys.”

  That night Henry, in his cabin, dreamed about Uncle Jack again. He’d started dreaming about him soon after he left Aunt Dorie. At first he told Aunt Dorie about the dreams, but then after Aunt Linda died and Aunt Dorie married Uncle Samuel, he stopped telling her about them. In this dream, they were walking along a wagon path to check rabbit boxes. Uncle Jack was striding fast and Henry was skipping along, trying to keep up, and Uncle Jack suddenly stopped, turned, squatted, laughed, grabbed both sides of Henry’s head and shook. Uncle Jack’s teeth were all gold, and the shaking made Henry’s neck tickle. Henry woke up laughing or dreaming he was laughing. He couldn’t tell which.

  The next morning, he felt full of energy. Uncle Jack never saw a sad day in his life. Henry thought again about asking Clearwater to let him borrow his car. It wasn’t that far back to Jeffries. But he’d say no, and he’d realize something was up.

  He dressed in his black suit, filled his valise with Bibles. He had picked up a box of free Bibles at the post office in Atlanta, general delivery, sent from the New Visions Bible Society in Boston. He tried on his new fedora in front of the mirror in his room, placed it toward the back of his head and then more forward and at an angle.

  He stopped by the camp office and left two letters to be mailed. The first was his form letter, with only the names, dates, and places changed.