The Bible Salesman
The john whom Brenda was here to meet had called the phone number at the back of the XXX mag and asked for her by name: “I want the girl wha’ goes by Dottie but who’s real name’s Brenda. And she better be the one sent—not someone else. I know exactly who owns this line and where you live.”
It was noon and hot and kids were playing in the swimming pool in front of the Blood Moon Motor Lodge, where travelers who didn’t feel like driving all the way to El Paso—12 miles northwest along the I-10—could pull off the road, cut the engine and ask if rooms were available and how much they cost, since the establishment had absolutely no fuckin’ sign publicizing this crucial piece of information.
“All part of the business plan,” Bubble Butt Bill, who ran the place on behalf of a rich widow in Galveston, would say. “If travelers know they’s no room available, or if’n they think it’s too expensive, they ain’t never gonna stop by and take a gander. But if they come in, we can tell ’em about the great things we have to offer, like Ginny’s diner wha’ serves eggs and pancakes from 4:30 in the a.m. to the p.m.—Or we can show ’em our collection of Betamax videos for rent, with adult films behind the curtain for lovers and newlyweds. And who knows? If’n they can’t stay this time, the memory of our amenities might inspire ’em to stop by and stay with us a year or two from now.”
After saying this, Bubble Butt Bill would look left and right to make sure no cops or well-dressed men were listening in and then he’d add: “Crooks and convicts love this place, ’cause the law in Sun City don’t have reach out here and the cops in Hudspeth County don’t give a shit what goes on outside Fort Hancock and Sierra Blanca. Far as I’m concerned, if I don’t see wrong happenin’, it ain’t happenin’. And if I see it happenin’, I turn my head and pretend it ain’t. . . And I sometimes get remunerated for that. One time, a man left an envelope with a hunnit dolla’ bill in it and a note thankin’ me for my discretion—and he spelled ‘discretion’ S-H-I-N, like an ign’int sum-bitch.”
Brenda parked her Plymouth out front and climbed the steps as an ice machine juddered to life and a fistful of cubes clunked into a plastic bucket. A lady with leathery skin in a paisley muumuu said “’scuse me” and carried the bucket past Brenda, snip-snapping her dirty white flip-flops on the concrete as she ambled down the tan-painted cinderblock passage that linked the front balcony of the motor lodge to the other side, where the truckers left their rigs for the night, where the dumpsters were located, and where the overflow parking lot could be found. Beyond a chain-link fence on that side of the building was a rough untilled field full of boulder-sized clods of dirt stretching back toward the low mountains with two broken-down oil derricks in the distance.
Brenda knocked on the door to room 30 (her age) and looked over her shoulder at the inflatable ball that soared up level to the rail of the balcony. She could hear the kids laughing and having a good time, and she thought it unlikely she was walking into a trap since cops tended not to conduct stings with kids around. “Come in,” a man’s voice said from behind the door. She wasn’t dressed like a cat in heat, but her lime-green bell-bottoms were snugger at the hips than a respectable woman would’ve worn them, and, combined with her gumdrop earrings, they were a dead giveaway for those who weren’t exactly church-goers as to what line of business she was in. She was afraid to touch her face because the sweat on her palms might smear her makeup. But the creep might find that arousing.
She turned the handle and opened the door. The room was dim but not dark since the curtains were incapable of shutting out the sunbeams entirely. And the TV was turned on with the volume down low. A toothy evangelist in a bright suit was preaching to a smiling congregation in a church-like studio full of pine pews, pastel hues, and audiovisual equipment arranged behind white trellises.
Brenda was struck by how cold the room was. The rattling air-conditioner under the broad window had lowered the temperature to the level of an icebox. And a thought came unbidden to her mind and almost made her faint, because if the guy was planning to kill her, he could leave her body on the bed, flee the scene and no one would be able to establish the precise time of death since the room was so cold. But the thing that fortified her was the realization that Trix, the madam running the switchboard in El Paso, was expecting her to return by 3:30 so she could pay her her cut; and since the john had asked for Brenda by name, he probably knew this already, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to need to obscure the time of death—assuming he planned to kill her in the first place. Trix wasn’t a bad person and would definitely go to the police if she suspected something had happened to one of her girls. Brenda’s mind was prone to run through paranoid channels and game out every potential scenario she could think of. But she was convinced that it was this overactive imagination of hers that had kept her alive this long.
The figure whom she presumed to be the caller had placed the room’s small round table between the dresser and the bed and was sitting in a chair behind it. She couldn’t see the man’s face clearly but saw he was dressed in a black jacket with a thin matching tie and a white button-up shirt. A tiny silver cross was pinned to the lapel.
The smoke of the cigarette he’d stubbed out in the ashtray hazed up the space between him and her; and as the smoke cleared, and her eyes adjusted to the uncertain light, she gasped and stepped back because she recognized the disfigured face with its crisscrossed web of burn marks emanating from the pale lips and the flap of a nose where the surgeon, trying to make things better had only made things worse. The fishlike film covering the man’s milky eyes reflected the light of the TV and that brittle uncaring smile made it seem as if Satan himself had taken on the body of the grim-suited man in that cold, dark, hazy room outside El Paso.
Brenda had never met her father but recognized him from the photographs. He’d been wounded in the South Pacific in World War II. A white phosphorus grenade (“white phosphor” or “Willy Pete” for short) slipped out of his hands and rolled back into his foxhole on the isle of Leyte in ’44. The grenade killed his buddy and burned 80 percent of his own body. Brenda’s dad—she refused to call him by name since she hated the bastard—had been born in El Paso. He’d been a loving husband before the war “but never got over the shock of what happened over there”—as mama was fond of saying in her feeble attempts to extenuate his outrages.
The disfigurement made it hard for him to keep a job; not because people wouldn’t hire him (he was a decorated war veteran), but because he couldn’t bear other people’s sympathy. And then one day he simply walked out on Brenda’s mom and was gone before his only child was born. Rumor and the occasional Christmas card had it that he’d turned to a life of crime, working as an enforcer and assassin for mobsters and masterminds in New Jersey, Kansas City, Chicago, Las Vegas and LA. Because it was impossible for him to blend in he was perpetually on the lam. He became a master of disguise—the man who kept to the shadows, a ruthless killer who sometimes even murdered those who’d hired him out of fear they’d rat him out.
Brenda wondered if this was a disguise. Was he now masquerading as a holy man?
Hot tears coursed down her cheeks as she considered what her being here portended and what it implied. Why was he staring at her that way? Was this to be his crowning sin? This unholy act? A vile notch on the bedpost to satisfy the sick urges of a tortured soul that would’ve better perished on the sands of Leyte.
“I know what’s makin’ you weep as you do,” the man said. “And I know that nothin’ I say nor nothin’ I do could ever do would set your mind at ease, nor bring you round to forgivin’ me for what I done to you and your mama.” He spoke in a coy sidewinding fashion, with words that seemed to dispel old doubts even as they sowed new ones. And his frown looked like a crooked smile and his smile seemed a sickly frown.
“I’m a bible salesman now,” he said. “It’s the last call I’m answerin’ before the last call comes. Last call, ladies and gentlemen. Hurry and finish up your sinnin’.” He wheezed and coughed and it might’ve been a laugh but it might’ve been something in his lungs dragging him to his grave.—But since he would’ve found that funny too, a laugh it must’ve been.
He was about to reach for his smokes, but thought better of it and reached instead for the bible in the leather case at his foot. “This one costs twenty-nine dolla’ and can be paid for in installments. It illustrates the life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” He was quoting from his script—from his spiel and it amused him mightily that she wasn’t amused. He turned away and stared at the unctuous preacher on the TV program who was backlit by a gaudy sunburst as the show cut to a commercial.
“I wasn’t always like this,” he said.
“I know,” Brenda said. “Mama said it was the war wha’ made you bad.”
Her voice revolted him. His sneer was terrifying.
“Oh no, baby girl. Men ain’t made bad as in ‘later in time’—they’re made bad from the womb. It’s in the blood from birth. You’ll wanna meditate on that. No matter how much we try, the bad’ll come out sooner or later. Why, look at you, wretch that you are. Are you playin’ the Magdalene now? The whore with a heart?”
She sat on the edge of the bed and reached across the table for his hand. He drew back, scowled at the ceiling and wagged his finger at her, shaking his head back and forth. “You won’t touch me. You won’t talk. You’ll listen and you’ll leave.”
He opened the bible to an illustration depicting the Sermon on the Mount. “You ever notice how the pictures in the bible don’t show Christ with the publicans and sinners? And when the downtrodden are shown, they faces is clean—spic and span, positively glowin’. No grit, no grime. Those ain’t sinners, those are stumblers.”
He pronounced the word “pictures” like “pitchers” and this caused Brenda to glance at the water pitcher on the dresser next to the ice bucket and lamp, because she thought the dresser would’ve been the logical place for him to set his gun if he was carrying one. But there was nothing on the dresser other than his wallet and keys.
“And I searched in my heart,” he said, “and could see nothin’ for the darkness. And I knew that the ways of my heart were wicked. And for 30 years I lived in utter loneliness. And I missed your mama and all those people I growed up with. But I couldn’t miss you ’cause I’d never known ya and I never wanted to—until now. Near the end. I’ve thought of you much recently and I’ve been moved to tears for what my life might’ve been and what seein’ you growin’ up might’ve been like.”
And he’d learned to use the word “and” by mimicking the King James Version, and he hurled his ands like stepping stones on the foaming torrent that poured from his gibbering lips. When he’d finished his mad oration, he regarded his daughter with those milky blue eyes and hoisted the leather case up onto the round table, which wobbled under the weight. Then he pointed to the open bible in front of her. “I wrote a message on the flyleaf of that bible for you and your mama.”
Brenda opened the cover and saw the crabbed writing in minuscule but couldn’t make out the words in the half light.
Then he handed her an envelope. “And in this envelope there’s a list of folks from the neighborhood I grew up in, who’ll remember the man I once was. I want you to give a bible to each one. And now I want you to go.”
Brenda put the envelope in the bible that he’d written in and set it on top of the stack in the case. He helped her close the case and snap both of the hasps shut. Her fingers brushed his and this made him flinch. He was no longer looking at her. He leaned over and turned up the TV because the commercial break had ended and the preacher was sermonizing again. The room echoed with the teary-eyed televangelist’s apostolic warble as Brenda went to the door.
The case was heavy. She had to hold the handle with both hands. She moved sideways down the steps and stopped to rest on the half landing. The children had eaten their lunch and their parents were making them sit at the edge of the pool to digest the food.
She made it to the Plymouth, and between the sweat and tears, the makeup was running down her face. She popped open the trunk and had to do a heave-ho to get the leather case inside. Then she went to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and tried to put the keys in the ignition, but her hands were shaking and she gave up. She was sobbing.
She wanted to tell him that it was his fault she’d become the person she was. It was his fault she’d gone to Austin for that illegal abortion when she was still in high school. It was his fault that, because of that operation she’d never be able to bear children. It was his fault she had never married and no longer felt anything but disgust for men. It was his fault that mama was a drunk.
She wanted to tell him these things. But she wanted to tell him something else. She wanted to say that she could forgive him for almost everything, if he’d only come back and try to make amends and fix the stuff he’d broken. Maybe they could become a family again. . . But Brenda knew that would never happen. And her face went red and her blood boiled over because that fuckin’ bible salesman—the man she refused to call daddy—hadn’t even paid a dime for her encounter with him. What was she supposed to tell Trix? She’d have to make something up, tell her the man was a religious nut and that when she had arrived, he’d just given her a sermon and a stack of goddamned bibles. Which was more or less the truth. Didn’t even giver her money for gas.
Brenda looked at the family by the pool. The mom was glaring at her with slit eyes, as if she knew or suspected what she was up to; and this made Brenda grin and wipe her face, which smeared her makeup even more. She looked at her reflection in the flip-top mirror on the sun-visor and had to admit that she looked like a lowdown hussy. She put the key in the ignition, started the car, backed up in the parking lot and drove off.
As the dust from the Plymouth settled on the cacti in front of Ginny’s diner, Bubble Butt Bill reached for the phone and dialed a number.
Brenda was 3 miles down I-10 when a car came barreling down on her ass, flashing its headlights for her to get out of the way. She rolled down the window and waved them to pass as she guided the Plymouth toward the shoulder of the road.
The car sped by and the man with sunglasses sitting in the passenger seat leaned out of the window and fired a sawed-off shotgun at close range. Brenda’s car veered off the road and skidded into a telephone pole with such velocity that the hood and trunk both popped open. Brenda’s decapitated torso slammed into the steering wheel and spattered gore onto the windshield and dashboard before it fell back against the seat.
The man who’d shot her sprang out of the car, ran to the Plymouth with the shotgun in hand, grabbed the bible case out of the trunk with one hand, and raced back to the road as quickly as he could considering the weight of the bible case. Meanwhile, the getaway driver executed a donut maneuver in the middle of the road, as a passing semi sped up and raced past, horn blaring. The trucker had seen what had transpired but dared not get involved. The man with the shotgun climbed in the backseat and slammed the door as his partner peeled off in the direction of the motor lodge.
The man in the backseat opened the leather case and pulled the bibles out one by one. He saw the false bottom halfway down the middle of the case and yanked it up, which pulled the pin from the WWII Willy Pete grenade. He saw the grenade and froze in horror because he knew he only had 3 seconds to live. Then white flames filled the interior of the car, killing both men instantaneously. The vehicle spun out of control and rolled five times before landing on its wheels. But the gas tank caught fire and the car blew up.
Bubble Butt Bill walked out of the front office and joined the patrons from the diner who’d gathered to gawk at the plume of black smoke rising from the mass of twisted metal in the middle distance. The kids had climbed out of the pool were crying. Their parents were comforting them.
The bible salesman stood at the balcony and lit a cigarette. He walked back into the room where an identical bible case had been placed on the dresser. Under the false bottom six bricks of cocaine had been stashed. He piled bibles on top of the panel, closed the case, snapped the hasps shut, put on a black fedora and departed, leaving the room key on the dresser. He walked between the cinderblock walls to the other side of the building and descended the steps where his car was parked by the chain-link fence. He put the case of bibles in the trunk of the black Buick, climbed into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition and drove to the front of the Blood Moon Motor Lodge.
Bubble Butt Bill licked his lips apprehensively as the Buick passed. The car stopped near the diner, signaled that it was turning right and exited the parking lot.
The bible salesman swerved to avoid the charred muffler and the burning tire that were in right lane. He reached over and turned on the radio as “A Cup of Loneliness” by George Jones began to play.
Approaching the wreck of the Plymouth, he saw a cop car with its emergency lights on parked on the right shoulder with a half-dozen flares laid out on the interstate. A solitary patrolman stood in the road directing the traffic through a single lane. His face was anxious. He was obviously waiting for backup.
The cars in front of him decelerated as they passed the telephone pole, trying to figure out what the gory mess in the driver’s seat was. The bible salesman didn’t so much as glance in the direction of the Plymouth as the lawman waved him through. He lifted one palm from the steering wheel by way of acknowledgement and continued on to El Paso.
Oh man, this is pure Southern Gothic class. Exactly all those McCarthy/O’Connor feels. Consider my fedora doffed, Daniel. 🔥
.. will return later this ayem.. eyes are fading - so stopped to Re-Stack at the ice machine ! .. clear as a desert day - the end result .. fresh eyes for this shooter & reader is what the writing clearly deserves !
🦎🏴☠️🎬