The head of Jesus bobbed above the shattered ultralight like a bird preparing to peck a worm.
11
Wayne crawled out of the wreckage and tried his legs. They worked.
Calhoun was on his feet cussing, unstrapping the shotguns and supplies.
Sister Worth lay in the midst of the wreck, the nylon and aluminum supports folded around her like butterfly wings.
Wayne started pulling the mess off of her. He saw that her leg was broken. A bone punched out of her thigh like a sharpened stick. There was no blood.
“Here comes the church social,” Calhoun said.
The word was out about Brother Lazarus and the others. A horde of monks, nuns and dead folks were rushing over the drawbridge. Some of the nuns and monks had guns. All of the dead folks had clubs. The clergy was yelling.
Wayne nodded toward the bus barn, “Let’s get a bus.” Wayne picked up Sister Worth, cradled her in his arms, and made a run for it. Calhoun, carrying the guns and the supplies, passed them. He jumped through the open doorway of a bus and dropped out of sight. Wayne knew he was jerking wires loose, trying to hotwire them a ride. Wayne hoped he was good at it and fast.
When Wayne got to the bus, he laid Sister Worth down beside it and pulled the .38s and stood in front of her. If he was going down he wanted to go like Wild Bill Hickok: A blazing gun in either fist and a woman to protect.
Actually, he’d prefer the bus to start.
It did.
Calhoun jerked it in gear, backed it out and around in front of Wayne and Sister Worth. The monks and nuns had started firing and their rounds bounced off the side of the armored bus.
From inside Calhoun yelled, “Get the hell on.”
Wayne stuck the guns in his belt, grabbed up Sister Worth and leapt inside. Calhoun jerked the bus forward and Wayne and Sister Worth went flying over a seat and into another.
“I thought you were leaving,” Wayne said.
“I wanted to. But I gave my word.”
Wayne stretched Sister Worth out on the seat and looked at her leg. After that tossing Calhoun had given them, the break was sticking out even more.
Calhoun closed the bus door and checked his wing-mirror. Nuns and monks and dead folks had piled into a couple of buses, and now the buses were pursuing them. One of them moved very fast, as if souped up.
“I probably got the granny of the bunch,” Calhoun said. They climbed over a ridge of sand, then they were on the narrow road that wound itself upwards. Behind them, one of the buses had fallen back, maybe some kind of mechanical trouble. The other was gaining.
The road widened and Calhoun yelled, “I think this is what the fucker’s been waiting for.”
Even as Calhoun spoke, their pursuer put on a burst of speed and swung left and came up beside them, tried to swerve over and push them off the road, down into the deepening valley. But Calhoun fought the curves and didn’t budge.
The other bus swung its door open and a nun, the very one who had been on the bus that brought them to Jesus Land, stood there with her legs spread wide, showing the black-pantied mound of her crotch. She had one arm bent around a seat post and was holding in both hands the ever-popular clergy tool, the twelve-gauge pump.
As they made a curve, the nun fired a round into the window next to Calhoun. The window made a cracking noise and thin, crooked lines spread in all directions, but the glass held.
She pumped a round into the chamber and fired again. Bullet proof or not, this time the front sheet of glass fell away. Another well-placed round and the rest of the glass would go and Calhoun could wave his head goodbye.
Wayne put his knees in a seat and got the window down. The nun saw him, whirled and fired. The shot was low and hit the bottom part of the window and starred it and pelleted the chassis.
Wayne stuck a .38 out of the window and fired as the nun was jacking another load into position. His shot hit her in the head and her right eye went big and wet, and she swung around on the pole and lost the shotgun. It went out the door. She clung there by the bend of her elbow for a moment, then her arm straightened and she fell outside. The bus ran over her and she popped red and juicy at both ends like a stomped jelly roll.
“Waste of good pussy,” Calhoun said. He edged into the other bus, and it pushed back. But Calhoun pushed harder and made it hit the wall with a screech like a panther.
The bus came back and shoved Calhoun to the side of the cliff and honked twice for Jesus.
Calhoun down-shifted, let off the gas, allowed the other bus to soar past by half a length. Then he jerked the wheel so that he caught the rear of it and knocked it across the road. He speared it in the side with the nose of his bus and the other started to spin. It clipped the front of Calhoun’s bus and peeled the bumper back. Calhoun braked and the other bus kept spinning. It spun off the road and down into the valley amidst a chorus of cries.
Thirty minutes later they reached the top of the canyon and were in the desert. The bus began to throw up smoke from the front and make a noise like a dog strangling on a chicken bone. Calhoun pulled over.
12
“Goddamn bumper got twisted under there and it’s shredded the tire some,”
Calhoun said. “I think if we can peel the bumper off, there’s enough of that tire to run on.”
Wayne and Calhoun got hold of the bumper and pulled but it wouldn’t come off. Not completely. Part of it had been creased, and that part finally gave way and broke off from the rest of it.
“That ought to be enough to keep from rubbing the tire,” Calhoun said.
Sister Worth called from inside the bus. Wayne went to check on her. “Take me off the bus,” she said. “…I want to feel free air and sun.”
“There doesn’t feel like there’s any air out there,” Wayne said. “And the sun feels just like it always does. Hot.”
“Please.”
He picked her up and carried her outside and found a ridge of sand and laid her down so her head was propped against it.
“I…I need batteries,” she said.
“Say what?” Wayne said.
She lay looking straight into the sun. “Brother Lazarus’s greatest work…a dead folk that can think…has memory of the past…Was a scientist too…” Her hand came up in stages, finally got hold of her head gear and pushed it off.
Gleaming from the center of her tangled blond hair was a silver knob.
“He…was not a good man… I am a good woman. I want to feel alive…like before…batteries going…brought others.”
Her hand fumbled at a snap pocket on her habit. Wayne opened it for her and got out what was inside. Four batteries.
“Uses two…simple.”
Calhoun was standing over them now. “That explains some things,” he said.
“Don’t look at me like that…” Sister Worth said, and Wayne realized he had never told her his name and she had never asked. “Unscrew…put the batteries in… Without them I’ll be an eater… Can’t wait too long.”
“All right,” Wayne said. He went behind her and propped her up on the sand drift and unscrewed the metal shaft from her skull. He thought about when she had fucked him on the wheel and how desperate she had been to feel something, and how she had been cold as flint and lustless. He remembered how she had looked in the mirror hoping to see something that wasn’t there.
He dropped the batteries in the sand and took out one of the revolvers and put it close to the back of her head and pulled the trigger. Her body jerked slightly and fell over, her face turning toward him.
The bullet had come out where the bird had been on her cheek and had taken it completely away, leaving a bloodless hole.
“Best thing,” Calhoun said. “There’s enough live pussy in the world without you pulling this broken-legged dead thing around after you on a board.”
“Shut up,” Wayne said.
“When a man gets sentimental over women and kids, he can count himself out.”
Wayne stood up.
“Well boy,” Calhoun said. “I reckon it’s time.”
“Reckon so,” Wayne said.
“How about we do this with some class? Give me one of your pistols and we’ll get back-to-back and I’ll count to ten, and when I get there, we’ll turn and shoot.”
Wayne gave Calhoun one of the pistols. Calhoun checked the chambers, said, “I’ve got four loads.”
Wayne took two out of his pistol and tossed them on the ground. “Even Steven,” he said.
They got back-to-back and held the guns by their legs.
“Guess if you kill me you’ll take me in,” Calhoun said. “So that means you’ll put a bullet through my head if I need it. I don’t want to come back as one of the dead folks. Got your word on that?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll do the same for you. Give my word. You know that’s worth something.”
“We gonna shoot or talk?”
“You know, boy, under different circumstances, I could have liked you. We might have been friends.”
“Not likely.”
Calhoun started counting, and they started stepping. When he got to ten, they turned.
Calhoun’s pistol barked first, and Wayne felt the bullet punch him low in the right side of his chest, spinning him slightly. He lifted his revolver and took his time and shot just as Calhoun fired again.
Calhoun’s second bullet whizzed by Wayne’s head. Wayne’s shot hit Calhoun in the stomach.
Calhoun went to his knees and had trouble drawing a breath. He tried to lift his revolver but couldn’t; it was as if it had turned into an anvil.
Wayne shot him again. Hitting him in the middle of the chest this time and knocking him back so that his legs were curled beneath him.
Wayne walked over to Calhoun, dropped to one knee and took the revolver from him.
“Shit,” Calhoun said. “I wouldn’t have thought that for nothing. You hit?”
“Scratched.”
“Shit.”
Wayne put the revolver to Calhoun’s forehead and Calhoun closed his eyes and Wayne pulled the trigger.
13
The wound wasn’t a scratch. Wayne knew he should leave Sister Worth where she was and load Calhoun on the bus and haul him in for bounty. But he didn’t care about the bounty anymore.
He used the ragged piece of bumper to dig them a shallow side-by-side grave. When he finished, he stuck the fender fragment up between them and used the sight of one of the revolvers to scratch into it: HERE LIES SISTER WORTH AND CALHOUN WHO KEPT HIS WORD.
You couldn’t really read it good and he knew the first real wind would keel it over, but it made him feel better about something, even if he couldn’t put his finger on it.
His wound had opened up and the sun was very hot now, and since he had lost his hat he could feel his brain cooking in his skull like meat boiling in a pot.
He got on the bus, started it and drove through the day and the night and it was near morning when he came to the Cadillacs and turned down between them and drove until he came to the ’57.
When he stopped and tried to get off the bus, he found he could hardly move. The revolvers in his belt were stuck to his shirt and stomach because of the blood from his wound.
He pulled himself up with the steering wheel, got one of the shotguns and used it for a crutch. He got the food and water and went out to inspect the ’57.
It was for shit. It had not only lost its windshield, the front end was mashed way back and one of the big sand tires was twisted at such an angle he knew the axle was shot.
He leaned against the Chevy and tried to think. The bus was okay and there was still some gas in it, and he could get the hose out of the trunk of the ’57 and siphon gas out of its tanks and put it in the bus. That would give him a few miles.
Miles.
He didn’t feel as if he could walk twenty feet, let alone concentrate on driving.
He let go of the shotgun, the food and water. He scooted onto the hood of the Chevy and managed himself to the roof. He lay there on his back and looked at the sky.
It was a clear night and the stars were sharp with no fuzz around them. He felt cold. In a couple of hours the stars would fade and the sun would come up and the cool would give way to heat.
He turned his head and looked at one of the Cadillacs and a skeleton face pressed to its windshield, forever looking down at the sand.
That was no way to end, looking down.
He crossed his legs and stretched out his arms and studied the sky. It didn’t feel so cold now, and the pain had almost stopped. He was more numb than anything else.
He pulled one of the revolvers and cocked it and put it to his temple and continued to look at the stars. Then he closed his eyes and found that he could still see them. He was once again hanging in the void between the stars wearing only his hat and cowboy boots, and floating about him were the junk cars and the ’57, undamaged.
The cars were moving toward him this time, not away. The ’57 was in the lead, and as it grew closer he saw Pop behind the wheel and beside him was a Mexican puta, and in the back, two more. They were all smiling and Pop honked the horn and waved.
The ’57 came alongside him and the back door opened.
Sitting between the whores was Sister Worth. She had not been there a moment ago, but now she was. And he had never noticed how big the back seat of the ’57was.
Sister Worth smiled at him and the bird on her cheek lifted higher. Her hair was combed out long and straight and she looked pink-skinned and happy. On the floorboard at her feet was a chest of iced-beer. Lone Star, by God.
Pop was leaning over the front seat, holding out his hand and Sister Worth and the whores were beckoning him inside.
Wayne worked his hands and feet, found this time that he could move. He swam through the open door, touched Pop’s hand, and Pop said, “It’s good to see you, son,” and at the moment Wayne pulled the trigger, Pop pulled him inside.
The Bible Repairman
Tim Powers
“It’ll do to kiss the book on still, won’t it?” growled Dick, who was evidently uneasy at the curse he had brought on himself.
“A Bible with a bit cut out!” returned Silver derisively. “Not it. It don’t bind no more’n a ballad-book.”
“Don’t it, though?” cried Dick, with a sort of joy. “Well I reckon that’s worth having, too.”
—Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Across the highway was old Humberto, a dark spot against the tan field between the railroad tracks and the freeway fence, pushing a stripped-down shopping cart along the cracked sidewalk. His shadow still stretched halfway to the center-divider line in the early morning sunlight, but he was apparently already very drunk, and he was using the shopping cart as a walker, bracing his weight on it as he shuffled along. Probably he never slept at all, not that he was ever really awake either.
Humberto had done a lot of work in his time, and the people he talked and gestured to were, at best, long gone and probably existed now only in his cannibalized memory—but this morning as Torrez watched him the old man clearly looked across the street straight at Torrez and waved. He was just a silhouette against the bright eastern daylight—his camouflage pants, white beard and Daniel Boone coonskin cap were all one raggedly backlit outline—but he might have been smiling too.
After a moment’s hesitation Torrez waved and nodded. Torrez was not drunk in the morning, nor unable to walk without leaning on something, nor surrounded by imaginary acquaintances, and he meant to sustain those differences between them—but he supposed that he and Humberto were brothers in the trades, and he should show some respect to a player who simply had not known when to retire.
Torrez pocketed his Camels and his change and turned his back on the old man, and trudged across the parking lot toward the path that led across a weedy field to home.
He was retired, at least from the big-stakes dives. Nowadays he just waded a little ways out—he worked on cars and Bibles
and second-hand eyeglasses and clothes people bought at thrift stores, and half of that work was just convincing the customers that work had been done. He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet. Still, it was better to err on the side of thoroughness.
His garage door was open, and several goats stood up with their hoofs on the fence rail of the lot next door. Torrez paused to pull up some of the tall, furry, sage-like weeds that sprang up in every stretch of unattended dirt in the county, and he held them out and let the goats chew them up. Sometimes when customers arrived at times like this, Torrez would whisper to the goats and then pause and nod.
Torrez’s Toyota stood at the curb because a white Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway. Torrez had already installed a “pain button” on the Dodge’s dashboard, so that when the car wouldn’t start, the owner could give the car a couple of jabs—Oh yeah? How do you like this, eh? On the other side of the firewall the button was connected to a wire that was screwed to the carburetor housing; nonsense, but the stuff had to look convincing.
Torrez had also used a can of Staples compressed air and a couple of magnets to try to draw a babbling ghost out of the car’s stereo system, and this had not been nonsense—if he had properly opposed the magnets to the magnets in the speakers, and got the Bernoulli effect with the compressed air sprayed over the speaker diaphragm, then at speeds over forty there would no longer be a droning imbecile monologue faintly going on behind whatever music was playing. Torrez would take the Dodge out onto the freeway today, assuming the old car would get up to freeway speeds, and try it out driving north, east, south and west. Two hundred dollars if the voice was gone, and a hundred in any case for the pain button.
And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece—just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.