All The Bells on Earth (12 page)

Henry had looked at her hard when she’d handed back their change, and he watched her now, over the top of his coffee cup. He had mentioned the “business proposition” again, but then had eaten his doughnuts in silence, the woman apparently having distracted him. Another of his manila envelopes lay on the table, clamped shut with its clip and then sealed with a strip of tape, as if the contents were top secret. Walt was in no particular hurry to look inside.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Henry said, and he got up from the table and headed for the rest room door.

Walt nodded, turning back to the newspaper account of LeRoy’s death: a one-time member of the city council and a highly respected local businessman, LeRoy had been “troubled” in the last months and had been questioned by police in regard to several cases of church vandalism, the nature of which made it sound to Walt as if “troubled” was too small a word; LeRoy had pretty clearly gone off his chump. He was suspected, the article said, of having loosened the bolts holding the bells at St. Anthony’s and causing the death of Mr. Simms, the bellringer….

Mr. Simms
… The dead man he’d seen yesterday suddenly had a name, and Walt almost wished he hadn’t learned it. He recalled the interrupted melody of the bells, how he’d felt standing under the roof of the garden shed while the rain fell, the words that had formed in his mind in anticipation of the next few notes: “What can I give him, poor as I am?” The lyric almost sounded fateful now, and it occurred to Walt unhappily that there wouldn’t be any church bells today at noon.

Why that should particularly bother him he couldn’t say, but he had a wild, momentary urge to volunteer to carry on for poor Mr. Simms, take a few minutes out of every afternoon just to do his part to provide a little solace in a world that didn’t have nearly enough. But of course he didn’t know the first thing about church bells except for what he’d seen in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The article went on to speculate that LeRoy might have committed suicide, immolating himself in the alley near the Continental Cafe after a night of rabid vandalism. A lawyer named Nelson had made a heroic effort to save him, but failed.

Walt heard laughter, and he turned around to look back at the woman behind the counter, who stood talking now to Henry. Henry nodded slowly, said something else that made her laugh again, and she put her hand on top of his hand for a moment and then took it away.

Walt coughed and got up, making a noisy issue out of pouring another cup of coffee. Henry looked at him and winked, and Walt smiled weakly. Probably there was no harm in it—just another one of Henry’s flirtations—but Walt had the uncomfortable feeling that Jinx would take a dim view of it, especially after the lunch wagon fiasco last year. He picked up the envelope and waved it, then looked at his watch. It was just six-thirty, and he was in no great rush, but Henry didn’t know that. The old man bowed gallantly, and for a moment Walt thought he was going to kiss her hand, but just then the door swung open and two men came in, and the woman turned away to help them.

“She’s in from Hawaii,” Henry explained, sitting down again and taking the envelope from Walt. He pried the tape up with his thumb and straightened out the clip. “Lived in Honolulu since thirty-six and ran a restaurant called the Eastern Paradise out on King Street—best damned Taiwan noodles you’ve ever eaten—red chili sauce, kimchee on the side. Jinx and I spent some time out there ourselves in the fifties.”

“I remember,” Walt said. “Couple of years, wasn’t it?”

“Three and a half. I wish we’d held onto that little bungalow on Kahala Boulevard.” Henry shook his head, regretting the past for a moment. “Right on the water—coconut palms, sand. You couldn’t touch it today for two million. We took twelve thousand for it and felt lucky. Anyway, we used to eat at the Eastern Paradise every Tuesday night—bowl of Taiwan noodles and a cold beer. Pure heaven. I
thought
I recognized that woman when we came in. The years haven’t touched her. Maggie Biggs, right here in Orange, It’s like fate, isn’t it?” He shook his head wonderingly, waving toward the counter with his fingers, tilting his head a little bit and smiling.

“Aunt Jinx will be amazed,” Walt said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t mention it to Jinx,” Henry said hastily. He frowned, remembering again. “I’m afraid there’s skeletons from those years that we’d better just leave salted away, if you follow me. They’d just make a hell of a stink if we dug them up now.” He looked around slowly then, as if something had come into his mind.

The two other customers sat two tables back, eating doughnuts and talking in undertones. One of them was a big man, immense. There were a half dozen doughnuts in his basket, and he took one out and bit it nearly in half. He seemed to know Mrs. Biggs, and he wore a flowered shirt, as if he’d just blown in from the Islands too. Suddenly Henry stood up, nodded at Walt, and gestured toward the table in the far back corner. Walt shrugged, getting up and grabbing the two coffee mugs and following him over.

“As soon as we apply for the patents I won’t care,” Henry whispered, gesturing at the envelope. “But for now …” He widened his eyes meaningfully.

“Of course,” Walt said. “Keep it between us. What do you have?”

Henry slid a paper out of the envelope—some sort of drawing, apparently of a space alien. Then Walt saw that it was meant to be a dignitary of the Catholic Church, maybe the Pope himself, or some pope, but badly compressed, as if he’d lived on the sea bottom all his life or on a planet with heavy gravity. There was a dotted line across his throat and a thing coming out of the back of his hat, which was pretty clearly on fire.

“What do you think?”

“It’s … It’s good. What … ?” He motioned helplessly with his hands. This was going to be worse than he’d feared.

Henry winked, took a pen out of his pocket, and wrote the words “Corn Cob Pope” across a napkin, let it lie on the table long enough for Walt to take it in, then wadded up the napkin and threw it into a nearby trashcan. He sat there silently again, waiting for a response, casting an anxious glance toward the other two doughnut eaters, as if he feared that at any moment they’d leap up and rush the trashcan.

It struck Walt all at once. “It’s a smoking pipe?”

Henry nodded. In a low voice he said, “Simple corncob pipe, really, carved to look like the pope. Novelty item.” He bent forward, pointing at the picture with the end of the pen. “The stem fits into a hole in his neck, body’s the bowl, smoke comes out here, through the fedora.” He indicated the pope’s hat.

“Fedora? Are you sure about that? I thought his hat was something else—a miter or something?”

“Isn’t the miter that stick thing he carries around? I couldn’t see any way to work that in. It has something to do with holy water, maybe, but either way, it doesn’t concern us here.”

“You must mean the smiter,” Walt said. “That’s what Catholics call the stick they used to beat the protestants with. What’s this line across his throat?”

“It’s a tip from Dr. Hefernin, believe it or not.”

“Hefernin’s in on this?” Walt’s appreciation for Dr. Hefernin soared suddenly. Apparently Hefernin was simply a world-class nut, which excused all kinds of sins.

Henry shook his head. “I applied one of Hefernin’s rules—‘diversify your market.’ ”

“Ah.” Walt nodded slowly.

Henry pointed with the pen again. “Look here. Stem’s detachable, and there’s a hinge at the back of the neck. Cock the head back and load it with candy. It doubles as a Pez dispenser. We grab the youth market that way.”

“Shrewd,” Walt said, suppressing the desire to laugh out loud. “I don’t suppose you’d load it with candy once it’s been smoked.”

“Absolutely not,” Henry said. “That would limit your market again. My idea is that you’ll indicate whether you want the Pez Pope or the Smoke Pope. A good share of the families will buy two—at
least
two.
We’ve
only got to have one model, though, with interchangeable parts. Overhead takes a nose dive.”

Walt was silenced. This made last winter’s asphalt paint look reasonable.

“Speak your mind,” Henry said to him. Then without waiting he said, “It’s a dandy, isn’t it?”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Walt remembered last night’s argument with Ivy, about the way he’d lain awake for who knows how long wrangling with it, with what had gone wrong. His wasn’t the only point of view. That was the lesson he’d learned last night—the lesson he’d been learning over and over again, but couldn’t quite remember whenever it was really
necessary
to remember. He forced himself to consider the fabulous popes from this new angle: what
would
people think about it? They’d gone crazy over gimmicks far more mundane. He looked at the drawing again, trying to picture someone smoking the thing in public.

“I’m virtually certain of one thing,” Henry said, sitting back in his chair and sliding the drawing back into the envelope.

Walt nodded for him to go on.

“The Japanese will buy it. The Pope’s scheduled his first Japanese visit summer after next—part of a goodwill tour, a big powwow with the Buddhists. The Japanese are crazy for this kind of thing. They have a word for it—I can’t remember what it is—Gomi-something. Have a look….”

He slipped several more sheets of paper out of the envelope, shuffling through drawings with carefully lettered subscripts and explanations. All of it was there: Pope Corn; Pope-sicles; Pope-on-a-Rope; something called Pope-in-a-Blanket, which was apparently a breaded hot dog; and Pope-pourri, a mixture of hyssop and myrrh and other biblical herbs that you put in a decorative Pope-shaped jar in the bathroom.

“All we need is seed money,” Henry said, speaking with utter confidence. He poured the rest of his coffee down his throat and clanked the mug down on the Formica tabletop. “The sky’s the limit.”

I
VY PULLED ONTO
CAPRICORN
Avenue, the street where her sister lived in Irvine, a “planned community.” The houses were all a uniform color—some variety of beige—and were landscaped with railroad ties and olive trees and junipers. Twenty years ago neighborhoods like this were going to be the future, but time hadn’t been kind to them, and the aluminum windows and Spanish lace stucco and rough-cut wood had deteriorated at about the same rate that the houses had gone out of style. The neighborhood didn’t have any air of financial poverty about it, just a poverty of imagination that was depressing, and for the hundredth time Ivy reminded herself that she couldn’t live happily here, no matter how close she was to the supermarket and the mall. Darla hadn’t exactly thrived here either.

A truck sat in Darla’s driveway with a magnetic sign on the side that read “Mow and Blow.” Ivy parked on the street and headed toward the house, past the three gardeners who worked furiously on the front lawn. There was the terrible racket of the mower, edger, and blower all going at once, the three men racing against the potential rain. The sky had gotten dark again, full of heavy clouds. All the blinds were drawn in the front of the house, as if no one were home, but that was just Darla’s style—the house dark and the TV constantly on for background noise or distraction or companionship. Darla rarely paid any attention to it.

Ivy rang the bell, and her sister opened the door, saw who it was, and burst into tears. Ivy walked in, putting her arm around Darla’s shoulder. The house smelled of dirty ashtrays and cooking odors, and on the television screen two soap opera people accused each other of treachery. Ivy shut it off and yanked on the drapes cord, trying to brighten the place up. The two-story house to the rear loomed above the fence, though, shading the sliding glass door. Rain began to patter down onto the concrete patio slab just then, and Ivy nearly slid the door open in order to pull the kids’ big wheels and bikes under cover. It was hopeless, though; the backyard, a narrow strip of patchy brown Bermuda grass lined with weedy brick planters, was strewn with toys and knocked-over lawn chairs and an expensive-looking propane barbecue that had clearly been rained on all winter anyway.

“How are you holding up?” Ivy asked.

Darla sobbed out loud, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Jack’s gone.”

“For good?”

Darla shrugged.

“Has he been drinking?”

She nodded. “He agreed to go to the marriage encounter, like I told you, but then he started going out after dinner. And last night he didn’t come home at all.”

“He’s a dirty shit.”

“He’s seeing somebody, some barfly. I know he is. I’m all packed.” She gestured in the general direction of the bedroom, then let her hand fall to her lap.

Darla looked pale, and she’d gained a couple of pounds since Ivy had seen her last, which was when? Last month some time, Ivy realized guiltily. Her hair needed some work, too, and she had yesterday’s makeup on.

“You slept on the couch last night?”

Darla nodded. “I waited up for Jack, but …”

Ivy tried to think of something to say to her, but realized she’d said it before. The junk-strewn backyard and darkened house was some kind of reflection of Darla’s fate, something that had crept up on her over the years. Walt was right about Jack. Drunk or sober the man was a creep. It was no secret to anybody else; how could it be a secret to Darla? How could any of this be a secret to Darla? “Where’s Eddie and Nora?”