The Bible Repairman and Other Stories Read Free Page B

van in the brightness. But he’s right, the police would take the kidnapping seriously, but not the ransom. The kidnapper doesn’t want money – he wants my blood, me.
    A living girl! he thought. I don’t save living people, I save ghosts. And I don’t even do that anymore.
    She’s like me.
    He shuffled back into the house, and set the cloth doll on the kitchen counter, sitting up against the toaster. Almost without thinking about it, he took the pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and lit one with his Bic lighter, then stubbed it out on the stovetop and laid it on the tile beside the doll.
    The tip of the cigarette glowed again, and the telephone rang. He just kept staring at the doll and the smoldering cigarette and let the phone ring.
    The answering machine clicked in, and he heard the woman’s recorded voice say, “No one is available to take your call, he had me on his TV, Daddy, so I could change channels for him. ‘Two, four, eleven,’ and I’d change them.”
    Torrez became aware that he had sat down on the linoleum floor. Her ghost had never found a way to speak when he and his ex-wife had had possession of it. “I’m sorry, Amelia,” he said hoarsely. “It would have killed me to buy you back. They don’t want money, they –”
    “What?” said the voice of the caller. “Is Mr. Torrez there?”
    “Rum he gave me, at least,” said Amelia’s voice. “It wouldn’t have killed you, not really.”
    Torrez got to his feet, feeling much older than his actual forty years. He opened the high cupboard and saw her bottle of 151-proof rum still standing up there beside the stacked china dishes he never used. He hoisted the bottle down and wiped dust off it.
    “I’m going to tell him how rude you are,” said the voice on the phone, “this isn’t very funny.” The line clicked.
    “No,” Torrez said as he poured a couple of ounces of rum into a coffee cup. “It wouldn’t have killed me. But it would have made a mindless … it would have made an idiot of me. I wouldn’t have been able to … work, talk, think.” Even now I can hardly make sense of the comics in the newspaper, he thought.
    “He had me on his TV, Daddy,” said Amelia’s voice from the answering machine. “I was his channel-changer.”
    Torrez set the coffee cup near the doll, and felt it vibrate faintly just as he let go of the handle. The sharp alcohol smell became stronger, as if some of the rum had been vaporized.
    “And he gave me candy.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Torrez absently, “I don’t have any candy.”
    “Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.” Torrez had always given her Reese’s Pieces, but before now she had not been able to tell him what she preferred.
    “How can you talk?”
    “The people that nobody paid for, he would put all of us, all our jars and boxes and dolls on the TV and make us change what the TV people said. We made them say bad prayers.”
    The phone rang again, and Amelia’s voice out of the answering machine speaker said, “Sheesh” and broke right in. “What, what?”
    “I’ve got a message for Terry Torrez,” said a woman’s voice, “make sure he gets it, write this number down!” The woman recited a number, which Torrez automatically memorized. “My husband is in an alarm clock, but he’s fading; I don’t hardly dream about him even with the clock under the pillow anymore, and the mint patties, it’s like a year he takes to even get halfway through one! He needs a booster shot, tell Terry Torrez that, and I’ll pay a thousand dollars for it.”
    I’ll want more than a thousand, Torrez thought, and she’ll pay more, too. Booster shot! The only way to boost a fading ghost – and they all faded sooner or later – was to add to the container a second ghost, the ghost of a newly deceased infant, which would have vitality but no personality to interfere with the original ghost.
    Torrez had done that a few times, and – though these were only ghosts, not souls,