Jose Wang and the Little Bible Store

                                José Wang and the Little Bible Store

    The town of Tina lay slumped between the cacti and boulders of New Mexico’s southernmost outreaches.  Beneath the lonesome sky the rusting spires of water towers, churches, and radio antenna poked upwards, battling the nearby herds of saguaro for vertical supremacy.  A single road slunk its way out of the red earth and into the town only to be swallowed again by the dust and sage on the other side.  It was four blocks that make up the depth and breadth of Tina.  The grocery, pharmacy, and funeral parlor gazed across the barren stretch of worn asphalt at the town hall and sheriff station like enemies that had grown too old and exhausted for continued contempt.
    A small shack behind the tired brown law enforcement building was the residence of the town’s so called defenders of the peace. Sheriff Daryl Denine, a bulbous man with a beard the color of the dirt, and his lone deputy of the surname Hullock.  Hullock, with no known first name, was a pole of a man.  It was his job to fetch the coffee, clean the firearms, and drive the mud colored police car.  Hullock’s job was, as the local population would say, “one even the wetbacks wouldn’t take.” While the sheriff sat behind his desk collecting his grievances against his fellow Tinanites it was Hullock that would make his hourly patrol down the street. 
    So regular was his patrol that shop owners could predict, up to the very minuet, when he would stroll past their windows.  At 17 past the hour he was in front of Allen’s Grocery with Newman’s Funeral Parlor two after that.  It was at 33 minuets past the hour that Hullock’s lanky frame would find its way to the end of the street and to the small dusty shop whose sign read in faded green lettering: The Little Bible Store.  Upon reaching the store’s door Hullock would briskly turn away from the shop and by 34 past the hour he was continuing his patrol on the other side of the street.  A minute later a small man named José Wang would ring the Bible store’s service bell to let everyone know they could come out of hiding.
    The interior of the shop was cramped and cluttered with religious offerings.  Large shelves of books covered the walls.  Works such as “Jesus’ Last Days” and “Moses: Man, Myth, and Legend” were spaced sporadically along the shelves, and intermixed with the multicolored bindings of countless numbers of Bibles. Bibles of varying sizes, but always bound in brown or black leather with a fine golden print were scattered about as if they had fallen down with the rain during a rare evening storm.  Piles of them were stacked in the windows and even more had heaped themselves into every corner, their glossy binding shining out against the green of the carpet and curtains. Crosses of various shapes and sizes adorned the back wall along with rosaries and a shelf of bottled holy water.  At the back of the store stood a glass cabinet and register, behind the register sat a small man on a wooden stool. 
    No taller than five feet and a half, José Wang was the resulting concoction of a Mexican mother, Lupé, and Oriental father named Onani. While his father made his way to Tina byway of Seoul, Shanghai, Seattle, Yakima, and a Western Pacific box car, Lupé, herself a grand duchess of the Mexican barrios, made her trip to Tina in a much more regal fashion. Equipped with an escort of workers, her caravan traveled only at night, and even made time for a brisk swim in a local river. As is typical with all immigrations, legality not withstanding, once one member of the family finds a suitable home, one by one their kindred population trickles in. First the mothers, then sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and the fathers, in a show of stalwart machismo, last of all.
    José’s family, being like all the others, was a mismatched assembly of souls jumbled together into the apartment above the Bible store. Numbering seventeen, in all, the heard of immigrants was nine from Mexico and eight from China, or Taiwan, or Korea, or wherever it was that they hailed. So bad was their English, some things always remained a mystery.  Though such boundaries abounded, the love between Lupé and Onani, like an armadillo that has been hit by a truck and refuses to die, has a strength that can overcome boundaries of language and legality. 
    As soon as the service bell’s quick ring faded from the store’s musky air, a rug behind the counter was pushed aside to reveal the ruddy brown face of Lupé Chang. Her large brown eyes stared up at her son through a carefully cut hole in the floor.
    “Who was it,” she said, lifting her hefty frame from beneath the floor.
    “Only Hullock, Mamá,” her son said.
    Once Lupé cleared the crawl-space another, much smaller head appeared. Onani’s small head emerged fallowed by a slender stalk of a body. As Onani’s feet found root on the carpet, yet another head popped into view. Like ants, the clan poured up from he ground. One by one, then by two, three and soon seventeen; the room filled with brown and yellow bodies. As soon as they had appeared, they were gone, absorbing into the musty rooms of the small building.
    “José, mind the store,” said Lupé. Her girth disappeared from site, but a small tremor still caused ripples in the holy water with each step she took.

    “Hullock,” barked the sheriff.
    “Aw, wh’, yes Sir?”
Denine leaned over his cluttered desk, a wet of dark brown coffee collected in his red mustache. “D’ju goby the Wang shop?”
“Ah, weh, weh, well, of course, sir. I went bys everywhere.”
    The sheriff looked at him expectantly. “…and?!” he said.
    “Well, ‘and’ what, sir? D’ju need some more coffee, sir?”
    “G’d damn it, Hullock,” said the sheriff.  “Didn’t you see them Wangs? All damn forty thousand of them? Held up in that shop like ants; just ain’t right. Makes me feel nervous.” The large man picked up the mug of coffee from his desk, his grumbles downing as the dark liquid met his throat. “Immigrants, Hul,…..’sjust not their land.”