All The Bells on Earth (6 page)

“Good. That’s nothing to be afraid of. In this economy, any business is good business.”

He looked searchingly at her, as if he were trying to see if there was anything in her face that he could read, some evidence that she still carried a torch for him, perhaps a candle, a lighted match…. Whatever kind of man he had been twenty years ago, he was made of something different now. The years had turned him upside down and shaken all the good things out of his pockets, unless you counted money as a good thing, and in his case it wasn’t. Aunt Jinx had called him a “husk” once, when Walt was going on about him, which was the word Jinx used for worthless, empty men. Ivy wondered now if that was fair. The evidence was twenty years old. Maybe there was a statute of limitations on that kind of thing.

Argyle remained standing as he talked, and she realized that she’d tuned him out. “… a couple of industrial properties over on Batavia, if you’re interested,” he said.

She nodded. What was this, a business proposition? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw my client coming in. What were you saying?”

He looked at her for a moment before speaking. “I was wondering whether you were interested in listing a couple of pieces of property.”

The idea struck her as odd. The last time she had spoken to him he’d—what?—propositioned her; there was nothing else to call it. She’d put him off pretty hard. Of course she hadn’t told Walt, who would simply have gone out of his mind. So the suggestion that they have dealings of any sort, even business dealings, was a complete surprise. Her first impulse was to turn him down.

But if there was ever a time that she and Walt needed the income from commissions, it was now. Why not take the man’s money? Walt was determined to make his business work, and he deserved to. Probably he
would
make it work, given enough time, because as screwball as some of his ideas could be, he had a certain strange genius for seeing the sense in nonsense, and making other people see it too. Not that catalogue sales was nonsense—Argyle apparently had done all right with his own mail-order businesses over the years….

“Perhaps I could drop by the office,” she said to him. Breakfast or lunch was out of the question.

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Make it day after tomorrow, can you? I’m going over to my sister’s tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “Morning? Say ten?”

“Ten’s fine.” She wondered why she’d mentioned her sister. Her personal life wasn’t any business of Argyle’s, and hadn’t been for a long time.

“How
is
Darla? I haven’t seen her in …” He shook his head, as if he was unable to remember.

“She’s fine,” Ivy said.

“What was her husband’s name?”

“Jack.”

“They’re still happy, then?”

“Tolerably. You know—ups and downs, like the rest of the world.”

“You’re not giving anything away, are you?” He smiled wistfully. “You aren’t still hard on me, are you?”

There was no answer to the question; whatever she was, it had little to do with him. The waitress approached just then, carrying the iced tea pitcher. Argyle pulled his lunch check out of his shirt pocket along with a five-dollar bill and waved it at her, smiling broadly and starting to say something.

And at that moment the check and the five-dollar bill burst into flame, flaring up like burning phosphorus with a bright, white glow. He dropped it on the ground, jerking his hand back and shaking it as if he’d been burned. The waitress, without seeming to think twice about it, bent over and poured iced tea on the burning paper, which fizzled out.

She picked it up and looked at the five-dollar bill, which was charred black along one edge. She shrugged. “Looks okay,” she said. “No harm done.” A busboy appeared and wiped up the floor with a rag, and at that moment Linda Marvel came in through the front door carrying a dripping umbrella. Ivy waved at her and motioned her over, relieved to be saved from Argyle, who seemed to be embarrassed nearly to the point of apoplexy. He stood unblinking, gaping at the waitress, then opened and closed his mouth like a fish.

“I guess the candle …” He gestured, not finishing the sentence. He tried to piece his smile back together. Linda slid past him and sat down in the empty seat. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ll just … I’ll leave you two alone.” He rubbed his hands together, looking detached, as if he’d been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost.

“Did you burn yourself?” Ivy asked.

“No. Not at all. Thursday, then?”

“Fine. Ten.”

He nodded and fled, going out through the door and into the rain where he hurried away down the sidewalk on foot, pulling his coat shut and angling out into the street.

“Do you want the candle relit?” the waitress asked, pouring what was left of the iced tea into Ivy’s glass. “I don’t know why it was lit anyway. Usually we don’t light them until later. A customer must have lit it.”

“I don’t think it
was
lit,” Ivy said. “Do we need a candle?” She looked at Linda, who shook her head. “I guess we don’t care about the candle.” She touched the bumpy glass vase that the candle was in. The glass was cool.

The waitress shrugged, and Ivy looked out the window again, distracted now. She could still see Argyle, far down the block, hurrying through the rain in the direction of Maple Street, probably heading home. He cut a very small and sorry figure from this distance, and Ivy was suddenly struck with the notion that whatever power he’d ever had over her had been illusory. Had she changed?
He
certainly had. There was a loud crack of thunder just then, and the rain poured down in a torrent, concealing him altogether behind a gray veil of mist.

W
ALT RECOGNIZED THE MAN
coming toward him. Hell. It wasn’t the burglar at all; it was worse—a minister, the Reverend Bentley from the storefront church down on Grand Street who had the irritating habit of making door-to-door forays through the neighborhoods, looking for converts, passing out little tracts.

Walt turned around to avoid him, but it was too late. He’d been seen, recognized. Bentley hurried forward, as if he had something urgent to say. He looked rumpled and beat, and his wet jacket was streaked with dirt. The rain let up just then, and for a moment the sun showed through a gap in the clouds. The minister looked up at the clouds and smiled, as if he’d put in a request and God had seen fit to grant it.

“Henry and Jinx on the horizon, then?” Bentley asked, shaking Walt’s hand.

Walt nodded. The Reverend Bentley was an old friend of Henry’s; they went way back—lodge brothers of some sort. Walt hardly knew Bentley, though, and he was slightly surprised that the man recognized him so easily, looking half drowned and hiding behind the umbrella. “They’re due any moment, actually. They were in Needles last night, and were thinking about taking a detour through apple country, but I expect them any time.”

“Good,” the minister said, looking around. “That’s good. I’m going to drag that old sinner in front of the congregation and flush out his soul with a firehose.”

“It’s high time,” Walt said. “What brings you out on a day like this?”

“Trouble in paradise,” Bentley said. “How’s
your
soul, by the way? You look like a worried man, like maybe you swallowed some kind of sin.”

The question took Walt by surprise. The minister could be a hell of an irritating old interloper when he was on a mission in the neighborhood. He was something of a local joke, in fact, and his church had a congregation you could put into the back of a pickup truck and still have room for the dog. He did good works, though, taking food around to shut-ins and the like. Lord knows how he continued to fund his projects. He had a sort of meals-on-wheels van that Uncle Henry had driven for a few weeks last winter, dropping off hot lunches at the houses of neighborhood widows. Aunt Jinx had put an end to it, though, after talking to one of the widows among the vegetable bins at Satellite Market. Walt himself had donated a hundred bucks to the meals program in a generous moment. That was a few years ago, when money had been a little easier to come by.

“I guess it’s still hobbling along,” Walt said.

“What is?” The minister was looking vaguely off down the street, not paying attention.

“My soul. You asked how my soul was doing.”

“Well … good. Keep at it, then. This is Babylon we’re living in, make no mistake about that. There’s a lot of temptations out there.” He looked meaningfully at Walt now, as if this tidbit of information had been hand-selected.

“That’s the truth,” Walt said.

“I can tell you that a lot of people fall,” Bentley said.

“Like ripe fruit.” Walt shook his head at the seriousness of it.

“Don’t be cocky.” The minister narrowed his eyes, convinced that Walt was making fun of him. “Pride goeth, as they say. Here—here’s a little something to read.”

He handed Walt a pamphlet, maybe three inches square, with a picture of a lion and a lamb on the front, lying down together with such wide, dopey grins on their faces that it looked as if they’d just been hit over the head with a mallet. The title of the booklet was “Marriage as an Obstacle to Sin.”

Bentley took Walt’s elbow suddenly and steered him toward the corner, pointing across the street, toward St. Anthony’s. “What’s going on there? My vision’s not …”

Without waiting for an answer he let go of Walt’s arm and hurried forward. Walt followed him, noticing now that there was a police car in the parking lot. Half a dozen people milled around near the base of the bell tower. It looked like the top of the tower had collapsed. At least one of the bells had fallen, and the bronze edge of it, shiny with rainwater, was shoved out of a gaping hole in the stucco tower. That was the noise he’d heard twenty minutes ago.

Bentley slogged through the water in the gutter, waiting for a gap in the traffic before sprinting across, two steps ahead of Walt. There was the sound of a siren from up the boulevard, and in moments an ambulance pulled up, slamming to a halt, its siren cutting off. The crowd parted, and for a moment Walt got a good look at the man who lay on the concrete floor at the base of the tower. Clearly the heavy bell had gone right through the upper floor, smashing the bellringer on the head and knocking him down the steep wooden stairs. The side of his head was crushed, and his mouth hung open unnaturally….

A couple of kids came around the side of the church, and a woman in the crowd turned and corralled them with her arms. “Stay back,” someone else hollered. “One of the bells came down. It’s still …”

Walt didn’t hear the rest of it. He turned away, walking back toward the street. The shadow on the roof early this morning—someone
had
been up there. Someone evidently had sabotaged the bell. Why the hell hadn’t he called the police? Now the bellringer was dead.

Without thinking he stepped down into the gutter, heard a horn honk, and jumped back up onto the curb as a car whizzed by, the driver shouting something at him and flipping him off out the window, over the top of the car.

Walt waved. The picture of the dead man—surely he was dead—remained in his mind as he waited to recross the street: in his mind he saw the bell tower, the stairs leading away into the shadows above, a shoe lying on the second step, the bottom step smeared with blood, a woman’s face mesmerized with the horror of it, her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself from screaming….

Walt shuddered. He wanted desperately to go home, to change out of his wet clothes and warm up. It was raining again, but he didn’t raise the umbrella. He walked a few steps farther, standing in the shelter of a big cypress tree and shielding his eyes from the water dripping through the branches. The two ambulance drivers stepped toward the back of the ambulance, carrying the body on a blanket-covered gurney. Presently the ambulance pulled out into traffic, switching on its siren and accelerating toward the west, probably heading for the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. Walt wondered if there was anything hopeful in the sound of the siren. Would they bother with it if the bellringer was dead? Would they cover the man’s face if he wasn’t?

He realized he was still carrying the tract that Bentley had given him, and suddenly the little folded bit of paper enraged him—a trivial little scrap of holier-than-thou advice in a world where someone had just been crushed to death in a blind instant. And at such a moment! Did the bellringer have a wife, a family? Did his wife consider marriage an obstacle to sin, or something considerably more than that?

Bentley was nowhere to be seen now; otherwise Walt would have thrown the tract in his face. He shoved it into his pocket instead, and then walked toward where two policemen stood talking, up under the roof of the portico at the front of the church.

And even as he stepped toward them he told himself that he could just as easily not say anything at all. It was too damned late now anyway. Speaking up now was nothing but useless humiliation, self-revenge….

But he forced himself forward, refusing to listen. One of the policemen turned and nodded at him, and Walt introduced himself, clearing his throat but still unable to get the gravel out of his voice, suddenly wishing to heaven that Ivy was there with him, holding his hand, that he wasn’t standing there wet and alone and empty on this bleak December morning.