The story that used to go around about Sundry Gimler, the janitor at Windfall High School and host of the “Jesus Is Christ Hour” on WPAW, was that he dropped from a hole in the sky into a hole in the ice in Windfall, Pennsylvania. That was the day Sundry discovered God, or the day God discovered Sundry, or at least the day Windfall did.
Sundry appreciated the mystery that surrounded him, though it made him lonely, for no one ever asked him where he came from; no one wondered what had drawn the girlish pink patches from his cheeks, or how he could be so flimsy and ancient-looking at the age of only thirty-eight. They liked believing Sundry fell from the sky, which was just as well because his past, he knew, was a sinful drama that could be disclosed only in a confessional. But Sundry would need to reveal himself, at least to Mr. Lisk, the owner of the radio station. Only by doing so could his secret wish come true: to have his wife, wherever she’d gotten to, hear his voice on the radio.
One day Sundry was filled with enough confidence to tell Mr. Lisk about his problem and ask for help. The “Jesus Is Christ Hour,” Sundry thought, had gone particularly well that afternoon because of the reasonable and well-articulated advice he had given to a caller whose son had recently died, and whose wife had taken ever since to thumbing her nose at the Lord. “Have patience,” Sundry had said. “And read to the woman, read from the scriptures while she’s sleeping. Whisper in her ear like you yourself was the Holy Spirit.”
Everyone who was listening, and Sundry himself, knew that the caller was Gene Orly, whose son had been killed by the state police. But Sundry stayed calm and was able to speak without hinting that he knew who his caller was. Easy as pie, he thought after the show, I’m cool as a clam, and calm to boot. He knew he would just have to come out with the truth to Mr. Lisk. Sundry decided to ask Mr. Lisk for an hour of drive time on the day of Sundry’s wedding anniversary. Then I’ll see to it, Sundry thought, that Ruby knows I’ve shook the devil clean out of me.
Sundry hadn’t seen Ruby in a long time. Six years before, when they were living in Altoona, he was looking for some stamps in her dresser drawers and found a wallet-sized photo of a man with a mustache whose ends drooped over his mouth like the walnut butts of twin six-shooters. On the back of the photo was written the name Ford. Sundry was filled with anger, and in such agony that he felt as if a number of alligator clips had been attached to his heart. It’s an odd feeling that at once makes one feel as bottom-ended as an anchor, and gives a distinct pain that is secretly savored by people whose lives have been lost and lonely ones.
Sundry got a bottle of transmission fluid from the garage, opened all of her drawers, and poured the fluid on her clothes. He emptied her shampoo bottle and filled it with liquid bleach. He put her favorite shoes, the ones from Italy that she never wore because she loved them so much, in the oven, and turned it up to 350 degrees.
With great fear of being judged Sundry explained this much to Mr. Lisk; they were standing in the parking lot, Mr. Lisk smoking a cigarette, Sundry buttoning and unbuttoning the flap of his shirt pocket. It was a bright and breezy afternoon. “Say, Gimler,” Mr. Lisk said, “What makes you think your wife will be listening to this station?”
“This station,” Sundry said. “We always used to listen in the mornings. Every weekday, except Saturday and Sunday.”
“Saturday and Sunday aren’t weekdays,” Mr. Lisk said. He dropped his cigarette and extended a foot to stomp it out. Sundry kicked out first to step on the butt and in doing so flung his shoe off his foot.
“Aren’t weekdays,” Sundry said, hopping over and stepping back into his shoe.
Mr. Lisk laughed. “You’re a treat, Gimler, I’ll give you that. But can’t you just call her or go see her?”
“Or go see her?” Sundry said. “No sir, can’t be done. I can’t bear to hear her voice, and I don’t think she wants to see my old butt-ugly mug ever again.”
“Quite a story,” Mr. Lisk said. “But I’m afraid I can’t give you an hour of drive time. Most of our listeners at that time of the morning are interstate commuters. They won’t be interested in hearing you pour your heart out to your wife, especially for an hour on a weekday morning before work.”
Sundry found Mr. Lisk’s way with words clever and enviable. “Pour my heart out,” he said. “Like a bottle of pop.” The new DJ, Keith Erskine, came out then to the parking lot, cleaning his nails with a plastic fork. He was an amiable fellow who laughed most heartily at other people’s problems. “Hey, hey,” Sundry said, trying to take advantage of the audience, “hey, Keith, hey, Keith. Do you know what happens when you wash your hair with bleach?” Sundry reached out to suggest that he was holding an imaginary shampoo bottle, shaking it up and down with two hands.
“No, I don’t know. What happens?” Keith asked.
Sundry looked at his hands then.
The men saw a change come over him. It was as if his body had been shot through by a kindly and drowsy spirit. They stood there waiting for the answer, Keith more than Stan Lisk, who was busying himself by turning his cigarette lighter again and again in his hand. Sundry dropped his head, closed his eyes, and said, “My wounds are loathsome and corrupt because of my foolishness.”
“So what happens?” Keith asked. “With the shampoo bottle?”
Stan Lisk tucked his lighter into his vest pocket. “Guess you’ll have to ask his wife.”
Actually Sundry knew what happened when his wife opened the shampoo bottle. He remembered that evening’s sequence of events very well because that evening he had been looking at the clock every few minutes, wondering who Ruby was with, imagining her body in the arms of Ford, the man in the photo. And he imagined the shame and surprise his wife and her lover would feel when they discovered that Sundry was not such a fool after all.
At six o’clock Sundry took one of Ruby’s crystal wineglasses, which had been a wedding gift from her sister, and threw it against the wall. It shattered like birdshot into a nest of diamonds. Then he threw a second and a third.
For a second he was calm, and knelt down to pick up the glass. But the name Ford came into his head again, and Sundry pressed another wineglass between his fingers until it broke. He bled. He tried to pull some of the glass out of his fingers and rinsed his hands in the sink. When he was calm again he went to the kitchen where Ruby’s shoes were baking; Sundry decided to turn off the oven. He would be too ashamed when telling this story later to admit that he was crying, but crying is not actually the right word. He was no longer filled with hatred for his wife but with self-loathing, and indulged himself in bleating like a slaughterhouse lamb.
When Ruby Shaw first saw Sundry Gimler, she thought he looked like a retired elf. He had a puny, boyish build, rosy cheeks, thin green eyes, and a tangle of gray hair from which translucent and seemingly brittle ears protruded. He’d been hired by Ruby’s father to paint their house. When it came time for Sundry to paint outside Ruby’s window, she opened the curtains and took off her clothes, thinking she might lie nude on the bed for the man to enjoy. She was twenty-three years old, with chocolate-colored hair and eyes, a medley of moles and freckles on her arms, and a habit of tapping the back of her hand against her double chin, hoping she could make it firm. When she heard Sundry coming up the ladder, she lay her head on her pillow and pretended to be in the midst of an erotic dream.
Sundry looked in and saw Ruby, then reached through the open window to close the curtains. He did this without thinking. In a way he was a man living by a noble code, though he was unaware of it and didn’t know that not everybody was like he was. He closed the window as well, but not before whispering to Ruby, in case he might have woken her, that he feared the noise and fumes would bother her.
At first Ruby was angry, but still she insisted that her father invite Sundry to dinner. Her father, Nelson Shaw, was a man born into an easy life. As a third-generation lawyer, he had never known a man who worked with his hands. He paid people to cut his grass. He didn’t know a bolt from a screw. He had become, of late, especially curious about the physical precision manual labor seemed to call for. All through dinner he and Ruby watched Sundry; she was especially impressed by how he carved his steak into identical rectangles, and how thoroughly he chewed his food. She guessed he was a man who did things right the first time. Probably a symptom of someone who can’t afford to make mistakes, she thought, refilling his iced tea and trying to get a look from him. He nodded once, and smiled. Mr. Shaw pointed a spoonful of peas at Sundry. “Gimler,” he said, “you’re a bit of a rooster, I bet. A real swinger, I don’t doubt it. But tell me: how old a hound are you?”
“Thirty-two. Though you wouldn’t know it by the hair. Been gray since high school. Something in the genes, I guess you’d say. But old Sundry,” he said, looking for a second at Ruby, “is no swinger. I’m still waiting for the right woman to come along and let me love her.”
Now Ruby regained her confidence. Finding out that Sundry was just thirty-two changed her impression of him. At first she had wanted to bring him into her bed and then tell him to take a leap, and now she thought that all she might like to do was whisper to him that she was fond of him. She found the evening suddenly romantic, like something from an old railroad song her grandfather used to sing about drinking up his poker IOUs and saying good-bye to a sweetheart before jumping the Allegheny line. She liked the idea that a man might call a girl his sweetheart, and thought she might like to be Sundry’s. Ruby asked him: “Do you have a sweetheart?”
Sundry was as gentlemanly as he had learned how to be, which did not preclude belching into a napkin, which he did before he smiled and said, “Who, me?”
To the surprise even of Ruby herself, her father agreed to her marriage to Sundry Gimler. Actually he was a kind father, but found his younger daughter tiresome. His older daughter, Nancy, was married and now had a child of her own to occupy her. And Ruby, he thought, was such a handful since her mother died, so preoccupied with curling irons and patent leather and three-day weekends; she would need a man who worked with his hands to keep her in line.
Both of Sundry’s parents had passed away; the only family he had to invite to the wedding was his cousin. On the bride’s side were Nancy, her husband, William, and their daughter, Jessica, who in Nancy’s arms brought flowers to the altar in little fists. They got married at Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Altoona and promised, according to Ruby’s handwritten vows, never to doubt the other’s power to lift you up to a higher plane, but always to respect the other’s ability to live without you. They were wise words, Sundry thought, and he was proud of his bride for being so eloquent and philosophical.
He had taken careful measures to ensure that their wedding would be pure by not allowing himself to make love to her until their wedding night. Though neither of them were virgins they both felt as if they were making love after lifetimes of celibacy. She put her arms around him and told him she loved him, and immediately he was through. It was a strange feeling that some couples may experience, the simultaneity of love and sex, which Sundry was enjoying for the first time. He found it lovely and even holy that on occasions when she would tell him she loved him, he would become aroused without a touch, only by those words.
But as excited by and pleased with her new husband as she was, Ruby thought it necessary to make her husband feel as if he couldn’t live without her. She thought he was too confident, due to his age and greater experience, that they would be together forever. One afternoon, after they’d been married just over a year, she showed Sundry a picture from the Sears catalog of a woman modeling lingerie. “Do you like that?” she asked him.
“The outfit or the woman?” Sundry answered.
Here Ruby thought for a second. “Both.”
“Well, then,” Sundry said. “I like both.”
Ruby slammed the book shut. “Two can play at that game,” she said.
Weeks later she followed up on her scheme.
“Dr. Bernard asked me today if I would like to work in his office,” she said. “His receptionist’s pregnant and he wants to know if I can take over because she’s not coming back.”
It was known that Dr. Bernard was a handsome divorced man who was often seen in the excited company of numerous smiling women, all of whose teeth gleamed pornographically, but Sundry seemed not to mind. When Ruby began working for the doctor, she came home every day with a lovelier compliment paid to her employer. “He really has a way with women,” she would say. “Can you imagine all the girls who would bend over backwards to be with him?”
This was one of many instances in which Ruby tried to draw Sundry into some kind of conflict; she wanted him to express the desire to smother her. But with little or no reaction from Sundry now she went to the garage and cried. She thought that Sundry didn’t care at all for her anymore. And he wasn’t spending much time with her; he’d joined a new crew and was painting all day long in summer, and in colder months was able to get some indoor jobs as well as some temporary wiring work. Although with his and her incomes combined they made more than enough money to live, he hoped he could manage things so that his wife would not have to work at all. In spite of what Ruby believed, Sundry was beginning to think he’d rather not have his wife working, especially with Dr. Bernard.
Rather than talk about it with each other, they talked to themselves and only revealed to each other the conclusions that had been drawn from their own monologues. And finally Sundry asked Ruby to quit working for Dr. Bernard.
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I’m telling you,” Sundry said, though he didn’t believe himself.
“Fine, then,” she said. “You’re such a stud.”
That night she lay in bed waiting for him as she had the day he came to paint the house. When he got under the blankets she told him that she loved him. “My little elf,” she said before she fell asleep. “My favorite tough guy.” Finally convinced that she had in fact gotten possession of Sundry by making him want to possess her, she was happy.
Ruby felt so much relieved in fact that she forgot about the picture she had put in her drawer. It was a picture of Ford Bonnie, one of Dr. Bernard’s patients. A few days before, she had seen the picture when he opened his wallet to retrieve his insurance card, and she asked if she could keep it. She brought it home and hid it in her dresser drawer, waiting to decide how she might use it to make Sundry need her.
On Tuesday evening, Sundry was hanging around the radio station hoping to have a chance to talk to Mr. Lisk again. He had just two days before his anniversary and had not been able to convince Mr. Lisk to let him have an hour of drive time for that day. He looked at Keith and wondered if he might be able to help. Maybe Sundry could get a few minutes of Keith’s Thursday morning slot, when Ruby would surely be listening to the radio at the dental clinic. Though Sundry was often uncertain whether she still worked there.
Keith said, “Let’s go have a beer and you can tell me all about it.”
“Tell me all about it,” Sundry said.
They went to the Inclined Plane, whose owner was obsessed with the promise of flight since the railroad was defunct. On the walls were pictures of hot-air balloons, the horizon at Kitty Hawk, and begoggled pilots giving thumbs up. Stuffed birds dangled from the ceiling on braided ribbons. The only remnant of the railroad industry was a locally invented drink called a Railroad Spike. It was a drink that gave you, according to a sign behind the bar, loco-motives.
The waitress came to their table. Her bottom lip was perforated with an empty piercing. “Infected,” she said, when she caught Sundry staring.
Keith held up two fingers. “We’re Yeungling people.”
“Two Yeunglings,” the waitress said.
Sundry had come to the Inclined Plane a few times before, but this was the first time he had had a drink in a public place since he’d come to Windfall. He drank his first beer and sat back, waiting for the devil to come on him, but the devil didn’t come. He was reassured then by his own self-control and ordered one more. He looked at his hands; Keith looked at them as well. “I crushed a wineglass in my fingers,” Sundry said. “I haven’t looked at my hands in a long time.”
“You’re one crazy woodpecker,” Keith said. “Now tell me about the shampoo bottle.”
“Shampoo bottle,” Sundry said, and he told Keith the rest of the story that he had begun to tell Mr. Lisk.
When Ruby came home that night she was not alone. She had her sister and her sister’s two-year-old baby with her. Sundry was sitting in a tree. He went back and forth between feelings of guilt and feelings of vindication, and in order to buoy his resolve he insisted to himself that she had it coming. From the tree, he couldn’t see in the house, but he imagined what Ruby would be doing, what she would see. First the carpet in the living room, where he’d thrown down some newspapers to cover the glass. She would be too curious then to do anything but examine the entire house, where eventually she would find her clothes ruined. Sundry sat up in the tree with all his power gone. He felt as thick and bloodless as a mattress. Nothing can be stopped now, he thought to himself.
He stayed in the tree for two hours, until his attention was drawn by the light that came on in the bathroom. In a way he was relieved, but also confused, that no police had come, that Ruby hadn’t come out of the house screaming and in tears. He wanted to say she was a bitch but could not summon that word to his lips.
If anyone familiar with the story of Sundry and Ruby was interested in the truth, they would want to know that, as incredible as it sounds, Sundry had forgotten about the bleach he had put in the shampoo bottle. And it was true that if he had remembered, he would have gone into the house to warn them against using the shampoo to wash the baby’s hair. Unfortunately it was also true that the worst thing that could possibly have happened did in fact happen. There was a scream, some crying and shouting: Jesus Christ, Shit, Oh my God. Ruby ran out of the house to start her truck.
And Sundry never told anybody, not even Keith, that he had actually gotten out of the tree and pushed his pocketknife into all of her tires.
When the ambulance came Sundry knew that he was damned. He tried to think how stupid the women were to use adult shampoo on a child, but Nancy would have forgotten to bring all the baby’s gear, not knowing they were going to spend the night. They might at least have noticed the smell of the bleach before they poured it on the girl’s head, but nobody can imagine such a cruel trick as Sundry played. It’s hard also to imagine a child blind in one eye, but it can’t be helped.
“Sure you don’t want to try a Railroad Spike?” the waitress asked Sundry and Keith. “What do you say? One for your baby, and one for the road.”
“One for the road,” Sundry said.
Keith grabbed her elbow. “No, no,” he said. “We’ve had enough of everything for tonight.”
“For tonight,” Sundry said. “That’ll do it for tonight.”
Though dreams are rarely clear, and often filled with all manner of disturbing and profound symbols, that night after he came home from the Inclined Plane, Sundry had a simple dream, a dream that he remembered because he woke up in the middle of it. It was a kind of flashback. In his dream he re-experienced his wedding day, and the vows that Ruby, so filled with romantic ideas, had written herself for both of them. But in the dream Sundry’s tongue was bloated so that he could not speak, and he was forced to communicate his marital intentions with a series of grotesque eye movements.
It was Wednesday now, the day before his wedding anniversary, and Sundry was ready to insist that he be given a fifteen-minute slot during Thursday morning drive-time to apologize to his wife, to his wife’s father, to Nancy, to Nancy’s husband, and to his niece Jessica, who would now be about nine years old.
Originally Sundry intended to use an hour to say what was on his mind, and he knew that he did in fact have the ability to speak confidently for that length of time. He would begin by summarizing the story of their courtship, how they had met when he was painting her house, how they had come first to excite each other, then to interest each other, then to comfort and trust each other, then to depend on each other for certain feelings of security and self-worth people rarely can bring about by themselves, especially once they’ve fallen in love.
More than anything Sundry thought he might just let Ruby know that he was not far from her, and that he would come back to her if she would have him. “I just need her to hear my voice,” he said to Mr. Lisk. “If you can just give me five minutes. I’ll do it like a public service announcement. Or like an advertisement.”
“You can do it,” Mr. Lisk said, “but keep it lively, at least. We’ll put Keith in there with you, just in case you panic.”
“Panic,” Sundry said. “Just in case you panic.”
“And keep it upbeat, will you?”
“Upbeat,” he said. “Don’t worry, I won’t pour my heart out like a bottle of pop.”
He walked home smiling, and hopped five times on one leg as he walked along the gravel pathway to his trailer. You’re looking at an upbeat person, he said to his reflection in the mirror. Old Ruby, I’ll show her what a positive thinker I am. He cut a picture of a boat from a magazine, put it in a tin frame, and hung it on the wall beside his bed.
He guessed Ruby must have wondered what became of him. The last time he saw her was the morning after he’d wrecked their house and ruined her things. When the ambulance left with Nancy and Ruby and the baby all in the back, he returned to the house and saw that everything was as he had left it. He put her clothes in the washing machine and filled it with cold water, and took her melted shoes out of the oven and put them back in the pretty box she kept them in. He swept up the broken glass. He waited for her to come home, but ran out the back door when he saw that she was coming home in a police car.
He spent the night at his cousin’s house and in the morning came back to see her. When he got to their house, she was standing outside by the curb, maybe waiting for a ride to work. He pulled up beside her in his car. For a second he was filled with the hope that perhaps she had already forgiven him. His feelings of rage and vengeance had passed so thoroughly that he couldn’t remember them. He was ready, he thought, to forgive her, if she would forgive him.
“I’m on my way to work.”
“Let me drive you,” he said.
“Listen. I won’t call the police, and I’ll convince my sister not to report you to the police, on one condition. I don’t ever want to see you again. Don’t worry about divorce papers or owing me any money. Just go. I can live without you.”
Now the devil was back. It came quickly, as quickly as it had passed before. “I wonder,” Sundry said, “if you can live without Ford.” And his pride made him drive away before she could say anything more, which probably was for the best. There are certain damages, even if they are simply the result of minute-long tantrums of devilish idiocy, that will not be undone, not in a lifetime, and that is what Sundry meant when he said that he was damned.
And with the devil’s spurs still stuck in his backside, Sundry went to his cousin’s house, got some cardboard boxes, and went back to his and Ruby’s place to get his clothes. He was moved by the fact that Ruby hadn’t destroyed any of his things, then saddened: he had hoped that she would act out as he had as a symbol of love, but she didn’t so much as knock over his archery trophy, which he had asked her never to touch.
For a few days Sundry tried again and again to call her, but there was no answer. When he drove by the house, her truck was still there with the tires slashed, but the house was dark and empty. He guessed she was staying with her father, or maybe her sister, and he knew that he would never see her again.
He asked his cousin what he should do. “Lame bitch,” Harry said. “You’re not going to let a woman get the best of you like that. Go on up to Windfall. I know a guy up there that will get you something to pay the bills. He’s a good bastard, named Mike Grassmier. He’ll hook you up.”
Sundry drove to Windfall a few nights later. Luckily the sky was clear and the stars had a calming effect on him. It’s not a long drive from Altoona to Windfall, and if you do it on a clear night with the radio on, the hours spent are enjoyable ones. There’s a stretch of road that passes among some of the lower hills of the Allegheny mountains. The road is carved into a cliff and there are signs warning of falling rocks.
When he arrived in Windfall he parked in the lot of the Muleshoe Bridge Museum and slept. He awoke with the sunrise and ate breakfast at a donut shop.
During his first few weeks in Windfall he was able to get himself a trailer with the money he had brought with him, and he spent many hours inside it. He cut pictures from discarded magazines and put them in frames. He made meticulous lists. One list was for short-term goals. He wrote on this list that he had to buy himself some decent socks, and had to look into picking up some secondhand silverware and plates at a garage sale. When he completed an item on this list, he crossed it out in strict red ink. He had a second list for long-term goals. For this list he had designated a number two pencil in case something might need to be erased. On this list he had written: Be the best janitor Windfall High has ever had.
Harry’s friend Mike Grassmier had helped Sundry get the job at the school. The work paid well enough, the wild behavior of the students both entertained him and reminded him to control his own temper, and he got his lunches for free in the cafeteria. In fact, since Sundry left Altoona, his life had been getting easier, and he started thinking of himself as a new man. He’d always had luck, he thought; but now his luck was good rather than bad. It wasn’t until he slipped through the ice over the frozen Nantichoke Lake that he stopped counting on luck and started to believe that it was God who had chosen him to survive.
He was walking across the lake because he wanted to pass among the smiling ice-skaters and envision himself as one of them. He fell through and was under the water for a short time until he was pulled out by a schoolteacher who was ice-skating with her family. “You dumb retard,” she said to him when she saw he was breathing regularly. “Can’t you read? Thin ice, written right there.”
Actually it was an event without real drama, but Sundry found it extraordinary. He was under water for about ten seconds, looking up at the hole he’d fallen through and thinking without language. Sundry claimed, after some reflection, that the sun shone through the water, “and filled it with something that looked sort of like the Holy Spirit.”
Those were Sundry’s exact words, but not many people believed him, even though his story had been printed in the Windfall Register. The cold bath made him dull, they said to themselves and each other; how can a man find God in Lake Nantichoke, how can God find a man under water? But few people argued with Sundry because after the incident he developed a speech peculiarity that made him a tiresome conversationalist with the habit of repeating everything that was said to him.
“You’re full of cow shit,” people would say. “Full of crapola.”
“Full of crapola,” Sundry would say. “Cow shit.”
He didn’t suffer any real injuries and was able to keep his job as a janitor at Windfall High. He worked hard all day and spent his evenings watching TV, taking up the Bible during commercials and memorizing parts that seemed somehow to apply to him. “And they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things,” he would think to himself when the students at the high school called him a dumb retard, as some of them had heard their teacher call him the day she pulled him out of the ice. “When my foot slippeth,” he said to the students once, “they magnify themselves against me.”
Months later, when Stan Lisk came to the school to see if any of the God-fearing students would be interested in doing a Christian radio show, one of the students suggested Sundry Gimler. “He’s your man,” the boy said. “An all out Bible-thumper.” And once Mr. Lisk mentioned the job to Sundry Gimler, there was no saying no to him.
“You understand, it doesn’t pay very well,” Mr. Lisk said.
“Doesn’t pay very well,” Sundry said.
“In fact it doesn’t pay at all. It’s a kind of volunteer thing.”
“Volunteer thing,” Sundry said, nodding his head. “A kind of volunteer thing.”
Despite Mr. Lisk’s lack of confidence, an amazing thing happened during Sundry’s first show. He was completely calm and talked in a monotonous but self-sure voice. Like a priest, Mr. Lisk said to himself while listening to the program in his office.
Sundry began the show with a reading from the Bible and then invited listeners to call with questions or comments. A woman named Lydia called and complained that her son was being ridiculed at school because one of his legs was longer than the other. And the neighborhood kids picked on him because his older sister had a large rear-end and because someone had seen her drop a cookie on the floor and then pick it up and put it in her mouth.
“Lydia, listen to what the Bible has to say about evil-doers. It says that they shall soon be cut down like grass. Their swords shall enter into their own hearts, and their bows shall be broken, and their arms shall be broken. There is a happy end for the man of peace.”
There were other people in Windfall who were listening to Sundry on the radio. In fact they were listening in order that they might entertain themselves by laughing at the notorious dullard. But when they heard his voice on the radio they were amazed.
A Toptown Gas Company employee who had always feared getting stuck in a conversation with Sundry when he came to read Sundry’s meter called as well. Without giving his name he explained to Sundry that he was constantly lusting after women, and felt that his desire was unwholesome. “They all look tasty to me,” he said on the phone. “I can’t help wanting to get a lick of every ice cream cone in the county.”
“My good man,” Sundry said, “that plague is man’s most common sickness.” And then Sundry reassured him with a passage from Psalm 17.
Travis Steptoe was listening as well that Sunday. He was a bitter and perverted man who had worked most of his life as a photographer of weddings. “Sundry,” he said. “May I make a confession to you?”
“Talk to me,” Sundry said, “but direct your words to the Lord.”
Travis Steptoe cleared his throat. People who were listening could sense in this man’s voice the decades of pain he had endured, and the torture he had practiced on himself. He explained that as a young man in St. Louis he had once had premarital relations with a girl of sixteen. He told Sundry that he loved the woman so much he felt as if he could not live without her. “I hoped to marry her,” he said, “but her parents were against me because I suffered from poor health. They feared I would leave her a young widow. When she married another man, the devil came on me and told me to show the pictures. You see one night as she was sleeping in my bed I took some photos of her. I pulled the sheet away from her body and gently turned her limbs into seductive positions. When she got married, I made copies of the photos and sent them to her family. I sent some to her husband, who left her the next week.”
“And what so possessed you,” Sundry asked, “that you would seek revenge on one you loved?”
“Bit by a snake,” Steptoe said.
“Sir,” Sundry said. “Sir. Bit by a snake?” There was a pause. “Let me read to you, if I may: My iniquities are gone over my head. My wounds are loathsome and corrupt, because of my foolishness. I go mourning all the day long, for my loins are filled with burning. I have groaned by reason of disquietness of my heart.” Sundry paused again. “Still listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sundry remembered now the last lines of Psalm 38. “Oh my God, be not far from me! Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!”
“Is that all?” Steptoe asked.
“Well,” Sundry said, “you need to make a confession, I think. Speak to someone of your church.”
“And that’s all? You’re full of crap,” Steptoe said and hung up the phone, and like that the show was over. Keith, who had been in the booth with Sundry, took off his headset. “As old Lisk would say, nicely done. Except for that last part; the old prick kind of snuck that one in there.”
When Sundry came out of the booth, Mr. Lisk shook his hand and said, “Nicely done.”
“Okay,” Sundry said. “Nicely done.”
It was Thursday morning and the eighth wedding anniversary of Sundry and his estranged wife. That morning when he came to the radio station Mr. Lisk told him he could have only five minutes.
“Five minutes,” Sundry said. He patted his shirt pocket, which contained a number of index cards. “Plenty of time, Mr. Lisk. I know what I want to say. And I do appreciate it, sir.”
“You’ve become quite a popular fixture around here,” Mr. Lisk told him. “It’s the least I can do.”
Sundry laughed. “Popular fixture,” he said. “What a way with words.”
Speaking at a normal speed, and pausing naturally at the end of each sentence, a person can say I’m sorry, Ruby approximately forty-eight times in one minute. In five minutes, Sundry Gimler said it 231 times. After that morning it became a fad for a while among the students at Windfall High School to see how many times they could say I’m sorry, Ruby in a minute. And afterward Sundry Gimler became known as Sorry Sundry. He had panicked that morning just before he went on the air. His head was filled with doubts that before he had not considered. He thought it possible that Ruby might be flipping through the stations and pass him by before recognizing his voice. It occurred to him as well that any excuses he might make were meaningless, and that he could only apologize. And maybe she had moved outside of the station’s broadcast range, and would only be able to pick up static on 1240 AM.
But the truth didn’t occur to him, and the truth was that as Sundry was making his apology, Ruby was in Buckhannon, West Virginia, letting a sixteen-year-old boy look at her bare breasts in exchange for a pack of cigarettes.
Sundry and Keith were standing outside the station after the morning show. “I guess I should get over to the school,” Sundry said. “Told them I’d be there before lunch.”
Keith patted Sundry on the back. “What a wild man you are,” he said.
Mr. Lisk came outside and touched Sundry on the shoulder. “You sure did say you were sorry, Sundry,” he said. “Quite a show. Do you feel better? You should feel better because you’ve got a phone call.”
Sundry was not ready for such an immediate response. Actually he hadn’t been prepared for any response. It was true that he hoped eventually to be reunited with Ruby, but for now he thought it would be enough for her to know how sorry he was.
He picked up the phone; it was Nelson Shaw, Ruby’s father. “I recognized your voice on the radio, Sundry,” he said. “I’m calling to let you know something. I don’t know where Ruby is, but I’m sure she’s doing just fine without you.”
“Without you,” Sundry said. He wanted to ask about Jessica’s eye. For a second he thought it best not to mention her name at all; maybe the old man didn’t even know.
“But we’ll never forgive you, Sundry. My granddaughter is blind in one eye because of you. If you want to hear something nice though, it’s this: if Ruby hadn’t begged me and my son-in-law not to, we would have come up there and broken your neck. We planned it, really. Almost did it, too. We found out you were in Windfall and drove up there, but you got lucky. I still can’t figure out why Ruby was against it, but she was, you dumb retard, you pig-eyed fuck-up.”
After the phone call Sundry went to his job at the high school, locked himself in the boiler room with the lights turned off, and ran his fingers along the scars on his hands. Now he knew that Ruby could live without him. That much was true, and it was good. But he also knew that he couldn’t have lived without her. She had saved Sundry’s life; she told her father to leave him alone. Maybe that had been her revenge, allowing him to live.
He stayed late at the school and stopped on his way home at the Inclined Plane, where he sat alone and drank a Railroad Spike. It tasted like coins. The model airplanes that dangled from the ceiling did perpetual tailspins in the wind from the ceiling fans. He drank three more Spikes, waiting for a crazy motive to come to him, and then he was out of money.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when Sundry left the bar and walked over to Lake Nantichoke. The moon hovered and burned white behind a thin gauze of cirrus clouds. The night was warm. Breezes made the lake surface ripple.
Sundry thought of a poem by Newt Bannister, local poet, auctioneer, and square-dance caller from Loyal Knob. It had a line that reminded Sundry of his life after Ruby: The heart hankers, it wants for poison, the line read, And I go mourning all the day long. His heart beats piled up as if some struggle between angels and devils were taking place in his chest; each beat was compounded by the last; each grew heavier and noisier.
He was tempted to jump from the dock into the water. The temptation was keen and pleasing in his mind. Jumping would be easy. The water would not be too cold. He was alone. If he jumped, nobody could save him. It was just a matter of filling his lungs with water.
He took off his shoes. He stepped to the edge and sat down. An empty canoe rattled against a post. A bat snagged mosquitoes. Sundry leaned over the water and saw something not unlike the Holy Spirit. It shimmered and quickly took to the deep. Already, Sundry thought, he had been saved from death twice, first by the woman who had pulled him out of the ice, and then by Ruby.
Sundry pressed his hands into his face. He stood up. My life, he thought, must have been meant to be lived, even if it gets lived like this. Gradually his heart slowed until each beat was free of the last, and without anxiety over the next. It felt like grace. “Let’s go home,” Sundry said aloud to himself. He was calm for now. The lake was not. He put his shoes on and walked home.