All The Bells on Earth (30 page)

The preacher shook his head. “I couldn’t see. Car’s probably stolen. Anyway, it didn’t have any plates. It’s the same one we saw earlier, though—I know that much. I don’t think it’s Argyle. I think it’s Nelson.”

“What on earth was that?” Aunt Jinx asked, coming around the back of the motor home now, dressed in a robe and wearing a pair of fuzzy bedroom slippers. She held a newspaper over her head to block the rain.

“Drunk driver,” Bentley said. “Looked like he fell asleep at the wheel.” He winked at Walt and then widened his eyes, as if this attempted murder were a nice illustration of what he’d just been talking about.

“Is everyone all right, then?” Jinx asked. “We’re fine,” Walt said. “No harm done.” “Then go to bed,” she said. “It’s too late for all this powwow, drunks or no drunks.” She turned around and hurried away then, and Walt heard the motor home door click shut.

“I’ll stop by tomorrow,” Bentley said meaningfully to Walt.

“Hang those bells up on the porch,” Mahoney said. “Let the wind work on them.”

The two men turned and hurried away, jingling toward the corner, and Walt grabbed the tennis shoe, then pinched up the flattened roach and dumped it into the shoe. On his way back into the house he hung the bells on a loop of bare wisteria vine. Right now he would take all this lunacy at face value. Whatever else Bentley might be, he wasn’t a liar. He believed, at least, that Argyle had murdered Simms for some kind of diabolical purpose. And with this car business …
Something
was going on—perhaps something deeper and darker than Walt had thought.

On a sudden impulse he laid the shoe on the porch, turned around, and stepped down onto the driveway, tiptoeing past the motor home as quickly and silently as he could and then cutting across the street fast. Bentley and the priest were nowhere to be seen in the opposite direction; they’d turned the corner, maybe heading up toward Argyle’s in order to use the bells against him. Walt shaded his face from the rain, ducking into the alley and opening the chain-link gate that cordoned off the Dumpster. He yanked a couple of trashbags out of the way, leaning over the edge of the bin, balancing there, the sodden nightshirt clinging to his legs, the scent of gin rising up around him like spilled perfume.

W
ALT RAKED LEAVES ON
the front lawn. It was just past noon, and the weather had cleared up some, although there was more rain forecast. It was going to be a wet Christmas. And a strange one.

It seemed to Walt that last night’s adventure out on the sidewalk might have been a fabulous dream: the streetlight under a black sky, Father Mahoney hopscotching toward him down the dark sidewalk, Bentley with all his wild talk about murder and demons, the mysterious car with the license plates removed. The little cluster of bells that he’d hung from the wisteria was gone, vanished in the night, as if all of it, bells included, were a figment—all of it except the return of the thing in the jar, which was in his possession once again.

Throwing it away had clearly been a bad idea after all. Argyle wanted it. Bentley and Mahoney wanted it. So who was Walt Stebbins to be hasty with the thing? And right now it looked to him as if throwing it out was every bit as hasty as … what?
Using
it, maybe. Whatever that really consisted of. He wasn’t entirely sure yet, not authentically so.

The bluebird was buried in the ground now, beneath one of the stepping-stones that led back to the garden shed. Henry knew about the tackle box, and that compromised it as a hiding place. Not that Walt didn’t trust Henry, who, after all, thought that the jar was still in the Dumpster, but there were too many strange forces at work in the neighborhood to be careless. As an extra precaution, he had dropped the Sprouse Reitz parakeet into a pint-size Mason jar, filled the bottle with gin, and put it into the bluebird’s tin box, then put the fake into the tackle box. If anyone broke in and stole it now—Argyle or Bentley—they could have it with his compliments.

He raked a pile of sodden leaves into an oversized plastic dustpan and dumped them into the barrel, and just then a horn tooted. It was the Reverend Bentley himself, just like he’d promised, pulling in at the curb, his face full of the same determination and urgency that Walt remembered from last night.

Walt waved at Bentley, who climbed out of the car and gestured at the motor home. Walt nodded. Henry was in. He had been out for a couple of hours that morning, but had come home an hour ago looking a little under the weather and had gone into the motor home and pulled the curtains. Whatever fires had been burning in him yesterday afternoon had dimmed considerably. Jinx was home, too, inside the house now, washing dishes.

The telephone rang, and Walt dropped the rake and went in through the screen door just as Uncle Henry appeared on the driveway, apparently having come out of the backyard. Jinx had already answered the phone. She handed Walt the receiver and went back to scrubbing dishes at the sink.

“Hello,” he said into the receiver.

For a moment there was no answer, and then a voice said, “Walt? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Walt said, “who’s …” But then he recognized the voice. It was Jack, liquored up. Jack! How the hell you doing? I figured you might call yesterday, like you said. The kids aren’t here now.”

“
I’ll
be the goddamn judge of that,” Jack said.

“What’s wrong?” Walt said. “Something up?”

“Don’t give me any goddamn
talk
,” Jack said to him. “I got through to Darla this morning. No more happy crap, man. That was all bullshit the other night. Shinola.
No one
does me like this.”

“Like what?” Walt asked.

“Like you know goddamn well what. What I call this is kidnapping, plain and simple. You took a man’s children.”

‘ ‘What I call this is drunk on your ass, Jack. Nora and Eddie are Darla’s children, and she asked us to look after them.”

“I
raised
those kids, damn it. I paid their bills, and I know my rights.”

“You don’t have any rights, Jack, except the right to sober up. It’s just past noon, for God’s sake. Put the bottle down. Give it a rest. You’ll talk more sense when you’re sober.”

“There’s a few people I’m going to talk a
hell
of a lot of sense to,” Jack said. “Or else my lawyer will. What I want you to do is have Eddie and Nora ready to go. Whatever crap they brought along, have that ready, too. I’ll be around to pick ’em up.”

“Don’t waste your time, Jack. You can’t have them.”

“Look, fuck you and fuck whatever game you’re playing. They’re
my
kids.
I’m
the only father they ever had.”

“Then that’s a hell of a dirty shame.”

“What the hell do you know about it? You don’t have any kids. It takes a
man
to raise kids. I don’t know what the hell
you
are, living off your wife, out in the garage all day yanking the goddamn crank, but you don’t have
any
right to keep a man away from his kids. I want ’em now. If I have to bring a cop along I’ll do it.”

“Bring a cop, Jack. You’re drunk as a pig. I wouldn’t trust you with a box full of tin bugs.”

“You listen …” Jack started to say.

“Shut the hell up,” Walt said, his voice perfectly even. “I want to ask you something about being a
man
. Where the hell were you all day yesterday? You call up night before last worried about Nora and Eddie, but you don’t want to talk to them—you’ll call them tomorrow. But where the hell are you tomorrow? Sloshed. Isn’t that right? You’ve been living on pretzels and salted peanuts? Vitamin C out of the lime slice? I didn’t even bother to tell the kids you called, because I
knew
you wouldn’t call back. You’re a king-hell asshole, Jack. Maybe you get it naturally. Maybe it comes out of a bottle. I don’t give a damn either way. But you better get a handle on it. Because until you do, I swear to God I won’t let you near these children. What you’ll get if you come around here is a fist in the face.”

“You can’t …”

“And fuck you too.”

He hung up the phone without listening to another word. His hand was shaking and he could barely breathe. He’d lost it, gone right over the top. And now what had he done? Kidnapped the kids? Maybe Jack
did
have some kind of rights. You pay property taxes long enough on a house, and you
own
the house; did Jack
own
the kids in that same way? He realized that Jinx was looking at him wide-eyed.

“I’m sorry about the language,” he said, shaking his head. “That was Jack. He’s been drinking for a week now. Darla’s gone back east to get away from him. That’s why Ivy and I have the kids. I’ve got a real attitude about all of it.”

“Lord have mercy,” Jinx said, putting her hand to her mouth. “Ivy told me something about that. And now Jack wants to take them back? He’s just figured all this out?”

“That’s about it.”

“Does he know which school they’re at? Because if he does we ought to call and warn them.”

“No,” Walt said. “And I don’t think he can find out, either, unless he calls every preschool in the area. Even then they might not tell him anything. Security’s pretty tight these days. I just don’t want him coming around the house when the kids are here, not when he’s drunk. I’d have to call the cops myself. Nora and Eddie don’t need that kind of scene.”

“You watch out for him, Walter. Don’t push him. Nora and Eddie don’t need that, either.”

Walt nodded. She was right. Whatever else he was, Jack was telling the truth about raising Nora and Eddie, and that was probably worth something. “It’ll work out,” he said. “Once he sobers up he’ll calm down.” Unconvinced, he went back outside, where Bentley and Uncle Henry were sitting on the clamshell chairs on the front porch.

“Here he is,” Henry said, motioning toward the front porch swing.

Walt sat down, his mind racing.

“Lorimer was asking about the jar,” Henry said, keeping his voice low.

“Lorimer?” Walt looked at him.

Henry nodded at Bentley, and Walt caught on. “Oh, of course,” he said. “I guess we haven’t really been on a first-name basis, have we?”

“I told him we threw it in the bin,” Henry said.

Walt looked from one to the other of them. “I’m afraid that’s true,” he said to Bentley. “In the alley. I didn’t want to tell you last night. Frankly, I was a little miffed about the break-in. Anyway, Orange Disposal hauled it away this morning. It’s landfill now.” Actually, this was a lie, but Bentley couldn’t know anything about trash schedules.

Bentley continued to stare at him, as if he were doubtful about all this. Henry watched Bentley uneasily.

“I’m afraid
I
made him toss it out,” Henry said. “It looked … evil. Something about it … Anyway, we got rid of it.”

Bentley nodded finally, then sat back in his chair. “You were absolutely right,” he said. “You did the right thing. It’s what I would have done with it.”

“Good,” Henry said. The old man looked nervous, somehow, like he was in trouble.

“Something wrong?” Walt asked him.

“No, no, no,” Henry said, wiping his forehead. His hand was trembling.

“You’re not a stupid man,” Bentley said, looking Walt in the eye.

Walt waited.

“What did you do with the bells?”

“Hung them up,” Walt said, surprised at this turn.

“Where? They’re still hung up?”

“No. I hung them right here on the porch. They disappeared. Someone stole them, I guess. The wind was still blowing them around at midnight, so it must have been early this morning.”

“Why would they do that—steal a few brass bells in the middle of a rainy night?”

“I …” Walt shrugged. “What were you saying last night?” Somehow Bentley reminded him of his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bender, drilling him for information, being as subtle as an ice pick.

“What I said last night was true. You can bet your immortal soul on it.” He leaned forward. “What do you know about the connection between Robert Argyle and Murray LeRoy?”

“I wouldn’t have connected them at all,” Walt said. “I read about LeRoy in the paper, about his going nuts.”

“He didn’t go
nuts
,” Bentley said. “It’s closer to the truth to say that he went diabolical, although maybe that’s the same thing sometimes.”

Walt nodded, widening his eyes.
Diabolical
, here it came again….

“Don’t play the fool,” Bentley said. “If you mean to say something, say it.”

“It’s just that all this diabolical talk …”

“Is what? You don’t like it, do you? You don’t want to think about damnation, do you? Not like that. It’s too unpleasant. It’s too
sharp
. It makes certain things too
clear
, and it’s an easier world when you can keep those kinds of things a little bit out of focus. ‘Don’t tell me too much,’ people say. ‘Let me believe the easy thing.’ Well, gentlemen, what I’m about to tell you isn’t easy.”

“G
O ON,”
W
ALT SAID
to Bentley. “We’re listening.”

“I’ll put it to you straight,” Bentley said. “Robert Argyle
sold his soul to the Devil.”