Read Online The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton - Free Book Online Page B

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