The Bible Repairman and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’ve seen a ghost, he told himself, that’s all. People see ghosts. The balloon man saw her too – he told her not to smoke.
    You fell in love with a ghost, that’s all. People have probably done that.
    He waited several minutes, gripping the iron rim of the trash can and glancing in all directions, but she didn’t reappear.
    At last he was able to push away from the trash can and walk on, unsteadily, toward Book City; that had been his plan before he had met her again today, and nothing else seemed appropriate. Breathing wasn’t difficult, but for at least a little while it would be a conscious action, like putting one foot in front of the other.
    He wondered if he would meet her again, knowing that she was a ghost. He wondered if he would be afraid of her now. He thought he probably would be, but he hoped he would see her again anyway.

    The quiet aisles of the book store, with the almost-vanilla scent of old paper, distanced him from the event on the sidewalk. This was his familiar world, as if all used book stores were actually one enormous magical building that you could enter through different doorways in Long Beach or Portland or Albuquerque. Always, reliably, there were the books with no spines that you had to pull out and identify, and the dust jackets that had to be checked for the dismissive words
Book Club Edition,
and the poetry section to be scanned for possibly underpriced Nora May French or George Sterling.
    The shaking of his hands, and the disorientation that was like a half-second delay in his comprehension, were no worse than a hangover, and he was familiar with hangovers – the cure was a couple of drinks, and he would take the cure as soon as he got back to his apartment. In the meantime he was gratefully able to concentrate on the books, and within half an hour he had found several P. G. Wodehouse novels that he’d be able to sell for more than the prices they were marked at, and a clean five-dollar hardcover copy of Sabatini’s
Bellarion.
    My books, he thought, and my poetry.
    In the poetry section he found several signed Don Blanding books, but in his experience
every
Don Blanding book was signed. Then he found a first edition copy of Cheyenne Fleming’s 1968
More Poems,
but it was priced at twenty dollars, which was about the most it would ever go for. He looked on the title page for an inscription, but there wasn’t one, and then flipped through the pages – and glimpsed handwriting.
    He found the page again, and saw the name
Cheyenne Fleming
scrawled below one of the sonnets; and beside it was a thumbprint in the same fountain-pen ink.
    He paused.
    If this was a genuine Fleming signature, the book was worth about two hundred dollars. He was familiar with her poetry, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her signature; certainly he didn’t have any signed Flemings at home to compare this against. But Christine would probably be able to say whether it was real or not – Christine Dunn was a book dealer he’d sometimes gone in with on substantial buys.
    He’d risk the twenty dollars and call her when he got back to his apartment. And just for today he would walk straight north to Franklin, not west on Hollywood Boulevard. Not quite yet, not this evening.

    His apartment building was on Franklin just west of Highland, a jacaranda-shaded old two-story horseshoe around an overgrown central courtyard, and supposedly Marlon Brando had stayed there before he’d become successful. Sydney’s apartment was upstairs, and he locked the door after he had let himself into the curtained, tobacco-scented living room.
    He poured himself a glass of bourbon from the bottle on the top kitchen shelf, and pulled a Coors from the refrigerator to chase the warm liquor with, and then he took his shopping bag to the shabby brown-leather chair in the corner and switched on the lamp.
    It was of course the Fleming that interested him. He flipped open the book to the page with Fleming’s name inked on