Page 77 of The Children of Eve

Little Lyman thought he might have to tackle the restroom after all. He opened the bottle of Redbreast and kept his hand heavy.

“You’ll go broke pouring so freely.”

“I got low overheads,” said Little Lyman, “and lower expectations.”

“Then life will struggle to disappoint you.”

“I got to say, it’s doing its damnedest anyway.”

Blue Tweed inclined his glass toward the Redbreast.

“Care to have one on me?”

“It’s kind of you, but I’ll stick to coffee.” Little Lyman refilled his mug from the last of the pot. “A lesson I learned from my father, who learned it from his: Never drink in your own bar, like that mantra you shared earlier.”

“The Bad Salesman. But that was advice not to be followed.”

“That your line, selling?”

“Isn’t it everyone’s, in some form?”

“I suppose so,” said Little Lyman. “Unfortunate if nobody wants what you have to sell, though.”

“A good salesman can make you buy what you don’t need. Averygood salesman will make you feel that you always needed it but never realized until he came along to point out the hole its absence had left in your life. But I don’t want to sell folk stuff they don’t need. There’s too much of that already, and it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. I want everyone involved to walk away happy from the deal. Hence, the Bad Salesman’s Mantra.”

“And you’re not one of the bad salesmen?”

“I aspire not to be.” He took a sip of whiskey. “I notice you haven’t asked me what it is that I sell.”

Little Lyman hadn’t asked him his name either. In his experience, men who wanted you to know their name shared it. Men who didn’t want you to know wouldn’t offer, and wouldn’t thank you for inquiring either. Here, Little Lyman gathered, was a member of the second tribe.

“Because I don’t want you to waste your time,” said Little Lyman, “or mine. Whatever it is, I don’t want it, and even if I did want it, I doubt I could afford it. And if I could afford it, I’d be someplace else right now.”

“Really? You wouldn’t be here?” Blue Tweed made the Old Hatch sound like a veritable nirvana, somewhere only a halfwit would abandon.

Little Lyman ruminated on the question. There was even a literal element to the act, because it was his habit to nibble at the inside of his right cheek when a subject required contemplation, lending him the aspect of a perturbed herbivore.

“I’d still own the bar,” he declared at last, “orabar, but I’d have someone else doing the heavy lifting. Spring and fall, I’d be planning a vacation, just some time to catch my breath. Odds-on, I’d already be gone by now, and you’d be talking to an underling instead of me.”

“Florida?”

Little Lyman shook his head.

“I don’t care for Florida. It’s full of too many of the people I’d be going on vacation to avoid. No, I’d visit Europe. My grandfather, he fought in Italy during the war and liked it—the country, I mean, not the fighting. He always meant to go back and see how he felt about it when he didn’t have to kill anyone.”

“Lucky I’m not selling Boca timeshares, then,” said the man.

“I guess it is,” said Little Lyman. He polished some glasses that didn’t require polishing. Blue Tweed studied his whiskey like one who had posed the fates a question and anticipated the response to be disclosed in amber.

“I sell Bibles,” said the man, “among other items, generally of a religious nature”—though Little Lyman had studiously continued not to ask.

Little Lyman hadn’t been aware that selling Bibles was even an occupation anymore. As far as he could tell, people were prepared to give away the word of God for nothing. Every second Saturday, a handful of evangelicals would gather in Leesburg, holding signs proclaiming the love of Jesus and handing out texts to anyone prepared to share their email details. If someone was of a mind to, they could give a fake email address and walk away with a shiny copy of the New Testament, though Little Lyman didn’t imagine God would approve of someone lying and accepting the New Testament in the same breath, seeing as how it cut against the grain of the whole transaction. If they were happy to listen to the whole spiel, and drop ten dollars as a sign of goodwill, they could take home a full bells-and-whistles set containing the Old Testament alongside the New, with a cheap tin cross on a ribbon that doubled as a bookmark, the ribbon-bookmark treatment not extending to giveaways.

Failing that, assuming you weren’t the sociable, giving, or lying type, you could wait for the opportunity to spend a night in a hotel and depart with a Gideon Bible, if only by ignoring the injunction to leaveit where you’d found it and call the Gideons if you wanted a copy of your own. Little Lyman reflected that, in a curious sense, selling Bibles was a little like dealing in anything other than the most specialized of pornography in the internet age: no need to pay hard cash for something when it was available for free at the push of a button, even if the porn providers had finally cottoned on to this and now cut most of the movies before the money shot, or so Little Lyman had been reliably informed by a friend.

Despite himself, Little Lyman was intrigued by the man’s vocation. Even as he spoke, he wondered if this was part of the pitch, and by being drawn in, he was destined to conclude the evening by parting with some of his hard-earned money in return for a doorstop with a fake leather cover and colored endpapers.

“That must be a tough way to earn a living,” said Little Lyman, “what with the Gideons and their like undercutting you at every turn.”

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