All The Bells on Earth (10 page)

He nodded. Here it came.

“I’m happy about it, too, because you’re the man I married. I did it on purpose. It wasn’t a mistake.”

“I wonder …” he muttered, but thank God she went right on.

“And what I want you to think about is who
you
married, because there’s things that I want, too, and I’ve always wanted them, and …”

She stopped. He could see that she was on the verge of tears, and he suddenly felt like a jerk. “Maybe you’re right,” he said after a moment. “Maybe I’m afraid of not making it and of dragging my family down with me—finding myself a middle-aged failure.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said. “Why can’t we make it together? You know, the Marvels’ signing the papers today wasn’t the only thing good that happened.”

“What else?” He acted surprised and happy, trying to cheer her up. Maybe they’d gotten through the storm.

“You wouldn’t guess who I ran into at Watson’s.”

He shook his head. “Jimmy Carter?”

“Bob Argyle.”

“What do you mean, ‘ran into’? Did you hit him with the car? I hope you killed him, because otherwise he’ll sue us.”

“He wanted to talk business.”

“What kind of business?”

“He’s got a couple of properties he wants to sell, commercial properties from what I could make out. There might be money in it. A lot.”

“We don’t want his money.” Walt caught himself. “Do we?”

“It’s not
his
money, really, is it? All kinds of people profit from a sale of property. Why shouldn’t I? Too many scruples? Scruples about what, exactly?”

“Well,” Walt said, “all I can say is that I don’t like it. I think he’s still a damned criminal. It’s a bad idea to get involved with him.”

“Who said anything about getting involved with him? We’re not going into some kind of partnership. All I’m going to do is sell a couple of pieces of property. And that’s why there’s escrow companies and legal documents—to keep everything aboveboard. What can be criminal about it? And how do you know he’s a criminal anyway?”

“I don’t know what kind of depths he’s sunk to, but it’s probably deeper than we can guess.”

“How would you know? You’ve avoided him for years.”

“Let’s just say I have my hunches. A leopard doesn’t change his spots.”

“Let’s just say that you’re not a disinterested party. You’ve got a conflict of interest the size of an elephant. I’ve gotten the man out of my life, and I’d suggest you try to do the same.”

“If you mean that my interests are different from his, then you win the prize. What I want to do is
keep
him out of my life. So why don’t you just tell him to go to Hell? No, wait a minute—he probably owns real estate there, too.”

Ivy stared at the ceiling, as if she were counting to ten. “I don’t know anything for sure yet,” she said, getting up out of bed. “I’m going to talk to him Thursday morning. So there’s no use fighting this one out right now. We might as well go to sleep and pick it up again tomorrow night. God knows we don’t want to get into the habit of going to bed happy.”

She disappeared into the bathroom, and Walt reached over to the nightstand to shut off his light. It was a good thing no one was keeping score; he knew vaguely that she’d mopped up the floor with him tonight, forced him into corners. Christ, he wished she wouldn’t cry in the middle of an argument. That always got him. He knew that he was in great shape when it came to throwing words around. He could go on all night, beating her up with words till she couldn’t take it any more. That was his strategy, wasn’t it? He just didn’t like to admit it. And so what if he was right? Was that enough to justify it?

Argyle! He’d been rid of the man for years, and now the dirty pig had polluted the whole day, popping up everywhere like some kind of damned jack-in-the-box.

Ivy came out of the bathroom wearing her nightshirt. She got into bed and turned out her light.

“Goodnight,” Walt said, bending over to kiss her on the cheek.

“Goodnight.”

“Sorry I’m so difficult sometimes.”

“So am I,” she said.

He didn’t take the bait. Hell, it wasn’t bait, it was a statement of fact. “Give me time to think about all of it,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. “Think.”

“I will.” He laid his head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, knowing he wouldn’t fall asleep easily, thinking about Argyle and what he was up to, his “dead mans grease.” There was the sound of rain running in the gutters outside, and somewhere in the distance the sound of sirens—fire engines pulling out of the station house down on Center.

It was a hell of a night for putting out a fire, he thought, raining like this…. The idea amused him, and for a moment he considered waking Ivy up and telling her, but probably she wouldn’t think it was all that funny anyway.

I
T WASN’T YET DAWN
when Walt got out of bed. Moonlight shone through the blinds, and the morning was quiet outside, with no sound of rain. It was his routine to put on a pot of coffee in the garage and read the newspaper for a half hour before starting to work, but he didn’t like to waste any real daylight on it. It was better to read while the rest of the world slept. For a moment, before going downstairs, he watched Ivy lying tucked up in the heap of blankets she’d stolen from him in the night.

After pulling his sweater on, he went downstairs and out through the back door. Except for a couple of big, swiftly moving clouds, the sky was full of stars, washed clean by the storm. In the east, toward the Santa Ana Mountains, the sky was gray with the dawn, and the twin peaks of old Saddleback stood out solid black against it. Everything smelled wet—the concrete, the soggy leaves in the flowerbeds, the morning wind that blew in off the ocean.

He stepped across the soaked lawn and in among the intertwined tomato vines in the garden. In the early dawn the vines looked black-green, dense with shadow, more lush than they had appeared to be yesterday afternoon. There was no sign of the tin box. It had sunk, probably, in the soft soil. Pulling up a tomato stake, he poked around in the dirt, wishing he had more light. Yesterday he really hadn’t paid any attention to where he was planting the damned thing; he’d been in too much of a rush.

He bent down and parted the vines, soaking the sleeves of his sweater. His elbow bumped one of the two leftover tomatoes, which was heavy, nearly the size of his fist. He hadn’t remembered them being as healthy as that, but then he hadn’t really looked closely at them, either. Forgetting about the bluebird of happiness for a moment, he found the other tomato, which hung beside a cluster of about half a dozen green ones, unseasonably late. The green ones would never ripen, not this time of year. He picked the pair of ripe ones, realizing suddenly why he couldn’t find the tin—a tangle of vines covered the ground over it now: the rain or something must have weighted them down, and they’d fallen across the mud.

He pushed them out of the way and scrabbled around with his fingers. There it was—the lid of the box, nearly sunk beneath the mire. He wiggled it free and stood up, stepping past the herb garden toward the lawn again, carrying the tin and the two tomatoes. Then he paused for a moment, surprised at what he saw: the herbs looked bad this morning, wilted and pale. The sage and the rosemary had collapsed like old mushrooms, and in the dim moonlight they were white, as if blighted with some kind of fungus. The basil was just a couple of wet brown sticks now. Two weeks of nearly constant rain must finally have rotted the roots….

He carried the tin back to the garage, suddenly unsure what to do with it. It was still dark enough outside to run it over to Argyle’s, where he could simply push it under the railing and come home again. Argyle could think anything he wanted to think.

He closed the garage doors before turning on the lights, then washed the tin in the sink and dried it off with paper towels. He set it on the bench and put the coffee on, then opened the tin and looked again at the bird, which floated in its slightly milky bath. The jar had leaked, and it smelled of gin, the whole thing reminding him suddenly of the worm in the bottom of a mescal bottle. The bird wasn’t quite as badly decomposed as he remembered.

What on earth did Argyle want with such a thing? That was the twenty-five-cent question. Anything good? Walt couldn’t imagine what. If it was for resale, then the man should be ashamed of himself, trafficking in rubbish. Walt had half a mind to show it to Ivy, just to illustrate what sort of a monster she was having business dealings with. But clearly he couldn’t, unless he made up some kind of elaborate lie to explain what he was doing with the tin in the first place.

The two tomatoes sat on the bench, as nice as any he’d picked last summer. The rain was hell on the herb garden, but the tomatoes apparently loved it …

… which was nonsense, of course. It rained every winter, but it had never made any difference at all to his tomatoes. There was no explaining them away so easily. But making a wish on a dead bird—wasn’t that about twice as loony? He wouldn’t allow himself to believe it.

What if Argyle believed it? How badly would he want the thing back? The thought stunned him, and the tin looked suddenly different to him, perhaps more repulsive than it had, but mysterious at the same time, attractive in some dark and primitive way.

He looked out through the door. There was a light on in the motor home, and the day was brightening. Whatever he meant to do, he should simply do it, before Henry figured out he was awake and wanted to talk about Dr. Hefernin and the pamphlets.

Abruptly deciding against returning the tin, he put it inside a drawer in the bench, then almost at once took it out and looked around for a better hiding place, just in case Argyle sent someone after it again. Climbing up onto the stepladder, he pushed aside the dusty junk piled in the rafters on a couple of sheets of plywood. He spotted his tackle box, opened the lid, and put the tin in the bottom, in among jars of salmon eggs and cheese bait and bobbers. Then he shut the box and wedged it in between his lashed-together fishing poles and a clothes-drying rack made out of wooden dowels.

He got down and looked. The tackle box was perfectly hidden from the ground, and it didn’t seem likely that anyone would pull junk out of the rafters looking for the damned tin anyway. There were a thousand more likely places for it to be hidden—dozens of boxes lying right there on the floor. He’d leave the back door to the garage locked, and the same with the shed doors. The motor home in the driveway, with Henry and Jinx going in and out, would discourage anyone from coming in through the front.

Quietly, he went out through the door and down the drive, past the motor home to the sidewalk. The coffee was ready. All he needed was the newspaper—which, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. Usually it lay near the sidewalk, wrapped in plastic in weather like this. He stooped and looked under the motor home, but the paper wasn’t there, either. Doubtful, he checked the front porch, then looked into the shrubbery. The last thing he wanted to do was call the paperboy on a morning like this, make him come all the way back out here with a single paper….

He saw Henry’s silhouette on the window curtain of the motor home. He was sitting at the table—no doubt reading the paper himself. Walt considered knocking on the door, but he stopped himself. It would look like he was miffed, which he was, but there was no use carrying on like that with Henry, who deserved an early-morning newspaper as much as anybody else. Henry tended to read the hell out of a paper, though, taking it apart like a cadaver so that what was left was a scattering of wrecked parts.

Giving up on the paper, Walt returned to the garage and poured himself a cup of coffee, then idly turned the pages of one of Dr. Hefernin’s pamphlets, trying to memorize a few phrases for Henry’s benefit. But his thoughts wandered to the jar, and it struck him suddenly that he ought to make another test of the thing. He thrust the idea out of his mind. There was something about toying with it that repelled him, that was almost obscene.

Immediately he saw that he was being silly. What harm could it do? And if he wasn’t going to use it—whatever that meant—then there was no point in keeping it, in stirring up a man as potentially dangerous as Argyle. Probably he should haul it down and throw it into the trash bin at the end of the street like he’d threatened to do yesterday.

Very well, then, he would try it:

“Throw the newspaper into the bushes tomorrow morning so that Henry can’t find it,” he said out loud, then immediately regretted it. His own voice sounded unnatural to him, hollow, like a voice out of a machine, and he wondered whom, exactly, he was talking to.

The question was vaguely disturbing, and he focused on the Hefernin pamphlets, chasing all thoughts of the bluebird out of his mind. “Water Seeks Its Own Level,” one of the pamphlets was titled. It was full of advice on “taking the plunge” but not “getting in over your head. Don’t thrash around,” Hefernin warned, and there was actually a sketch of a toothy-looking shark swimming along, the words “insufficient capital” written across its back. Walt skimmed the article, searching for something concrete, something that wasn’t all clichés and ready-made phrases—something that would warrant spending fourteen dollars and would make an intelligent man order another one. But there was nothing, only a few testimonials at the end regarding the huge sums of money that people had made by putting Hefernin’s “philosophy” into practice. The Reverend Bentley’s tracts looked positively useful by comparison. Bentley nearly always promised you something final and discernible, an actual destination. It was generally always Hell, but at least he was decisive about it.