The Bible Salesman Read online

  “Is it like the museum in Raleigh?” Dorie asked Jack.

  “Not exactly. You’ll see.”

  “I’m just not sure about this.” Somebody had loaned him a white jacket cut off at the waist. He was up to one of his schemes. The jacket and a little card he’d gotten from somewhere could get them all into the Electra — a special building that sometimes admitted only club members or high-priced ticket buyers. Jack was dressed as a cook, or waiter, a helper of some sort.

  A low bridge crossed the channel, only wide enough for the trolley tracks, and Henry looked out at the water and boats. Tall masts with white sails and shiny wooden motorboats moved about. When the motorboats went fast, water slashed up from both sides in front.

  “They might not ever open it up to cars,” said Jack. “They’re going to keep it special. And don’t y’all be ashamed. We’re as good as any of these people.”

  When they stepped down the trolley steps on Swan Island they were standing in a small station like the one they’d just left. The station was across the street from the house of the famous Papa John McNeill, the founder of McNeill, the town back across the channel. They could trolley around the island, but walking was cheaper.

  They’d driven down in the truck that day, about an hour’s drive, from Simmons to McNeill, then over on the trolley to Swan Island to see a building that would be all lit up with electricity, and to hear a big band that would play inside. It was a famous place, Uncle Jack said. Henry thought he’d be able to see water surrounding the island, but standing in the trolley station he couldn’t see water anywhere. Jack asked a man in a uniform for directions. The man told them about five blocks and pointed. As they walked, Henry looked on the ground for wooden play blocks. After a while, he stared at the biggest building besides a city building he’d ever seen. It was three levels high, each of the top two levels a little less wide than the one below it, and on the very top was a tower with windows. He could hear music coming from inside. Uncle Jack led them up a wide set of stairs to a porch that went all the way around the building. A short line of people waited at a door. A bald-headed man sat behind a table. He waved at Jack.

  “You-all wait right here for a minute,” said Uncle Jack. He stood in line and handed the man a card when his time came. Then he motioned for them to come with him.

  Inside was a large, open space with a shiny floor. At one end sat a raised stage with a giant clamshell behind it.

  Four men on the stage played piano, guitar, bass fiddle, and trumpet. Caroline grabbed Henry’s hand. Polished, dark wood columns stood around the large, open dance area. Red, white, and blue streamers hung from the ceiling. Electric lights brightened everything, and the late daylight shone through high windows in the west wall. As Henry looked up, he turned in a half circle.

  Women and men stood talking. Some of the women had little clips holding back their shiny hair. The men wore coats and ties. No woman had a scarf on her head, and no man had on just a T-shirt. Some, holding small, thick glasses in their hands, occasionally glanced at Henry and Caroline.

  Jack led them onto the porch. And there, just beyond a field of white sand, lay the ocean. Henry thought about Jesus walking on the sea, calming the waters during that terrible storm.

  “Look,” said Dorie. “Look at that screen. That’s for a movie, ain’t it?”

  A big movie screen stood in the shallow surf. Men in white coats were placing beach chairs on the beach between the Electra and the screen.

  “Sure is,” said Jack. “You-all go get some food. I need to do something over yonder.” Inside, Henry, Caroline, and Aunt Dorie filled their plates with small red potatoes, string beans, fish that wasn’t fried, small pieces of all-mixed-together lettuce and tomato and cucumber, and big rolls. They sat on the steps and ate together. Uncle Jack was setting up chairs. He turned and waved to them.

  Henry watched and listened to the dressed-up people talk and laugh. He didn’t see many other children except for three colored boys and a colored girl with their mama, who was dressed in white. He stepped back inside the door and watched as twenty or thirty men dressed in black suits prepared to make music. They moved with purpose and ease — like they might be from New York.

  Then the music commenced: a fast song, a brass sound that filled every space in the room, drums in his chest. People took to the dance floor. Henry stood still. Caroline, Jack, and Dorie came in and stopped beside him. Caroline leaned against him.

  When a slow, quieter song started, Jack took Dorie’s hand and said, “Come on, honey. Let’s give it a try.”

  “Jack, you know I can’t dance.”

  “You know good and well there ain’t nobody from the church all the way down here.”

  “I can’t do it, Jack. I’m not supposed to.”

  “Well, you’re going to watch the movie, ain’t you?”

  “Nobody’s said anything about movies.”

  “Yet. They’ll get to it.”

  As night came on, people wandered out to find seats on the beach and others gathered on the sand off to the side of the beach chairs. Henry, Caroline, Jack, and Dorie walked down the steps.

  Jack said, “Let’s leave our shoes under the steps.”

  “I’m wearing hose,” said Dorie.

  “So? Let’s take off our shoes and socks, boys and girls.”

  Henry sat on the bottom step and pulled off his shoes and socks. He watched Aunt Dorie. She had turned her back and was taking off her stockings. He stuffed the socks into the shoes and felt the sand beneath his feet, cool.

  Evening had calmed the ocean. They found a place near the beach chairs and sat on the sand without a blanket or quilt like some others had, and suddenly a bright light was thrown upon the movie screen and Henry followed the light back to its source — a machine he’d seen on a platform. A man stood behind the machine. The images on the screen were of men running across a field in a war and then of a big city. The main film then began, a story about a man in a fancy suit and a woman who almost had a halo. She had shiny earbobs and was either smiling or sad.

  As they watched the movie, a gigantic, full, dull orange moon crept up out of the ocean as if to command armies, and people pointed at it, and Henry felt like it was so close that he could walk to the edge of the water and hold out his hands, palms up, and feel heat from the deep orange glow, then ride out in a rowboat along the path of reflections on the water, hold up an oar, and touch it, feel the oar against the crust.

  The woman and the man were dancing up on the screen, and Jack said to him and Caroline, “Y’all sit right here,” and he reached and pulled Dorie up by her hand. He led her over to a place on the beach that put the full moon right behind them, took her in his arms. They danced slow just like the people in the movie. They danced in front of the moon and then away and then back in front of it. Henry guessed that this might be the beginning of when Uncle Jack would not drink any more beers and Dorie would dance when Jack wanted to. He guessed that this was what his mama and daddy did before his daddy got hit by the timber.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Caroline.

  “The moon.”

  “Me too. I was thinking about how it throws out beams of love that go into your heart.”

  “It’s like it’s alive and sad.”

  Caroline grabbed his arm, hard. “Look.”

  Aunt Dorie was motioning for them to come. She was standing with Uncle Jack and two men. The men pointed back toward the Electra, where two policemen talked to another man in a white coat. Uncle Jack jerked his arm from a policeman’s hand. The policeman put his hand on the stick in his belt, and Uncle Jack kept talking.

  Aunt Dorie walked toward him and Caroline now. She bent down and said, “We’ve got to go on out front and wait for Uncle Jack.”

  There was plenty of room on the trolley going back over to McNeill.

  “Some people are going to look down on you no matter what,” Uncle Jack said to Henry and Caroline. “But it takes a sorry son of a bitch to
do it who’s rich and in a club and got all he needs to get along and can run a big, fancy showplace like that and make more money than he can burn, and some of them don’t even cut their own goddamn grass!”

  “Jack, I don’t think —”

  “I’m going back over there,” said Jack. The trolley was slowing to a stop. “And I guarantee you they’ll know I was there. Here I bring my entire family, my niece and nephew and —”

  “We got to get off, Jack.”

  “Chaps my ass. It just chaps my ass.”

  “Jack. They ought not to be hearing this.”

  “Oh yes they had ought to be hearing this.”

  Henry, Caroline, and Dorie were on the ground. Jack stepped down from the open door of the trolley, then sat down on the step. People stood behind him and then stepped around him. “That son of a bitch said white trash. I guess nobody ever called the Dampiers white trash,” he said to Dorie.

  “Jack, let’s don’t do this. Come on away from the trolley.”

  Henry and his cousin Carson, who’d come up from Florida on the train for a two-week visit, mashed the blackberries in water and painted streaks on their faces and circles on their stomachs and pulled loincloths tight up between their legs, fastened rope around their waists, and let the ends of the cloths fall. Then they ran for the woods down past Mrs. Albright’s back porch. Henry had told Carson about the cats. Mrs. Albright was out beyond her backyard picking blackberries, and a few cats were along. She waved to the boys and they walked up to her.

  “You’re Henry’s little cousin, ain’t you?” Mrs. Albright said to Carson.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Linda’s boy?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Can you make the cats talk?” asked Henry.

  “We might have to wait a minute or two,” said Mrs. Albright. “That’s Isaac, and that’s John. The big John. Not John the Baptist. He’s inside. Isaac, do you have something to say?”

  “I thought you were killing Indians yesterday, boys,” said Isaac.

  Henry looked at Isaac. “We were, but today we’re Navajo braves.”

  “Things switch around, I reckon, yes sir,” said Isaac. “Do you boys know what the Germans are doing in Europe?”

  “No,” said Henry. He looked up at Mrs. Albright. “No sir.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Isaac.

  “Well, well, well,” said John. “Not everybody thinks so.” John’s ear twitched twice. He looked to the weeds at a butterfly and knelt, stalking.

  Carson and Henry hid in ambush in the woods, then rode sidelong on pretend, gaudy-painted ponies, rising up at the last minute in terror-provoking splendor to shoot arrows — nails embedded in the ends of dried water reeds — into pine tree stumps, then whooped and hollered and charged into the bloody melee and scalped half-dead and stupefied soldiers with homemade tomahawks. Then rode off as reinforcements rode after them. They outran the reinforcements, hid, and slaughtered all of them too. And then scalped them.

  The next afternoon Carson was Tom Mix and Henry was Johnny Mack Brown. They joined the U.S. Cavalry and sat in a tree and shot their air rifles and murdered over a hundred Indians, picking them off one by one, Indian braves who had foolishly camped in a narrow ravine.

  Henry told Carson about the Electra, about all the lights, the big group of men who could every one play a musical instrument.

  PART III

  EXODUS

  1950

  In a wooded area just off a wagon path, Clearwater knelt on one knee, digging a hole with a broken jar. He’d just driven the Chrysler, while the boy, Henry, drove a stolen Oldsmobile a good distance ahead of him. They’d come from Cloverdale Springs Resort in Georgia to this spot near Treadlow, Georgia, clearly marked on a hand-drawn map. Henry was working out fine.

  Henry felt good about his new job. It was easy, for one thing. Mr. Clearwater picked up the car from the criminal while Henry waited somewhere in the woods, or maybe behind a warehouse. Mr. Clearwater would drive up and get out of the stolen car, into his own car, and then Henry drove the stolen car, following a map to a place in the woods. They would bury stuff, switch license plates on the new car, transfer equipment, just like the regular thieves would have done. Mr. Clearwater knew a lot of hiding places and how to camouflage things. He’d been trained in the army and in the FBI and he kept records, maps, and all. And then they sold the car and Mr. Clearwater mailed the money to the FBI. Henry was paid in cash because they were undercover.

  Henry was feeling kind of rich, and kind of comfortable, but still concerned about his Bible discoveries. And there was something not quite right about making money, a lot of money anyway, without working hard. It wasn’t Christian somehow.

  Mr. Clearwater finished digging the hole, then buried a billfold, papers, pencils, and two pairs of gloves from the glove compartment of the Oldsmobile.

  The real robbers doing the actual stealing were sometimes in too big a hurry to do the little things that had to be done. Mr. Clearwater’s job, and Henry’s, Henry was learning, was to do exactly what criminals would do, else he and Clearwater might get caught, not by the law, but by somebody in the car-theft ring. The police would be no problem, of course, since Mr. Clearwater was in the FBI — they’d just let them go — but the criminals could get nasty.

  Clearwater packed dirt with his hand, smoothed over the small mound with his fingertips, scattered leaves and pine straw over his work, stood and dusted the knees of his pants.

  Henry leaned against the Olds, his hand on the fender, waiting, sport coat sleeves too short, hair still standing up on top in back. “There’s no tool like the fingers,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Clearwater.

  Henry had had a chance to see some of the criminals down in Grover, Florida. They seemed like regular people. That showed how smart they were. One of the car painters had a gold tooth in front. Mr. Clearwater had said it was important for Henry not to talk to them.

  Clearwater wiped each hand low on his pants in the rear, just above the cuff. “Go bring the Chrysler,” he said. “Here’s the keys.” He tossed them.

  Henry pulled the Chrysler up beside the Oldsmobile, turned off the ignition, got out. “I like them white-sidewall tires,” he said. Mr. Clearwater was wiping his hands again.

  Henry looked out across the field of broom straw that stood just beyond a few trees. The first stars of evening were beginning to show, and far across the field stood a long line of black pines. In the sky just above the pines lay a strip of yellow sky. It made him almost remember something he and Uncle Jack had done.

  Clearwater opened the trunks of both cars so they could transfer the boy’s belongings and some of his. He retrieved eight license plates from eight states; two crowbars; a fifth and half-fifth of Henry McKenna in a paper sack; a portable Royal typewriter in its case; a zip-up canvas bag containing two wigs, a hunting jacket, binoculars, two .38 pistols, a pearl-handled .32, masking tape, rope, three sticks of dynamite, blankets, and rubber dishwashing gloves.

  He got out a clean white shirt and put it on, looked over at the place he’d buried the billfold and glove compartment contents. It looked good. He made an out-of-the-way incision in the Oldsmobile trunk lining and pushed the license plates through, then motioned for Henry, now standing there waiting like he ought to, to put his things in the trunk. Henry stepped over and placed his suitcase, valise, and a new cardboard box of Bibles in next to the spare tire.

  Clearwater noticed a speck on his glasses. As he wiped it off, he saw that it was a dark red. If you found the sweet spot above and behind the ear there wasn’t much trouble if you could swing hard with both hands — real quick. Knocked them out cold. But if you missed it and had to hit him again . . . not good. They’d be ducking and moving all around, and you sometimes couldn’t be accurate, might get a little spatter. He didn’t like to use the crowbar that way. He could kill somebody. Misuse of tools. That’s what his pistols were for. He’d killed with pistol, rifle
, bayonet, and piano wire in France six years before and had experienced the luck of having bullets hit all around him but never touch him, and he’d experienced the weakness in his knees and the tingle in his chin just as he witnessed life leave somebody. You had to do your job. It was a job. And this was a job, just at a different place and time, all in the same world, a world that was no more than a place for things to happen. If your job brought wealth, then good.

  “Okay, I’ll follow you this time,” said Clearwater. “I’ll drive the Chrysler. And remember, if we get split up, pull over and let me find you.”

  They drove along in the night on a two-lane blacktop for about an hour, meeting few cars. Henry thought about home. It wouldn’t be too long before he could save up enough money to buy a car. He might could buy Caroline one too, or Aunt Dorie. Or maybe one for both of them. He might get a chance after six months or so to join the FBI as a regular G-man. Mr. Clearwater hadn’t mentioned it, but for sure that’s what would come next. He’d have to tell Carson. Maybe he could even arrange for Carson to come to work for the FBI too.

  They stopped at a service station and filled up with gas. Clearwater took the lead for the final short stretch. As he drove, he pulled a letter from his pocket, turned on the inside light, and read directions. He looked at the map and then up to the road. In a few minutes he turned onto a gravel road and then into the driveway of a house with a large, two-story garage out back. People there would have information on any new options he might have. He went in, then came back out and explained to Henry that the Oldsmobile would be painted within twelve hours and they’d be on their way. They would spend the night in a room attached to the garage.

  Henry sat in the chair beside his bed. “How did you find out about this place?” he asked.

  “It’s all arranged beforehand.” Clearwater took off his shirt, folded it and placed it in his suitcase, turned back the covers on his bed. “They are very well organized, and it’s all made up of several branches.”