All The Bells on Earth (49 page)

Then, with a startling suddenness, there was a flash of dazzling yellow light and what sounded like a human cry. The golem turned in slow circles, flapping its arms slowly, caroming off either wall of the alley, engulfed in flame. The fire was white, like a chemical fire, and Argyle could feel its heat, incredibly intense. The golem fell to its knees, then straight over onto its face, curling up on the ground like burning paper. It was over. The thing was dead. The voices in Argyle’s head were silenced. He looked up at the Merry Christmas sign, but he felt nothing, no dark desires, no compulsions. He climbed out of the car and hurried back to the trunk, throwing it open and hauling out a fire extinguisher.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw people coming out of the cafe, hurrying forward. “Here!” he shouted stupidly, and ran to the mouth of the alley, squeezing the lever of the extinguisher. The rain beat down now, harder by the second, and he had the incredible urge to laugh out loud, to turn around and hose everyone down with the extinguisher. The golem was a heap on the ground, like a burning pile of trash, and the flames flickered lower, running up and down like witch fire across what had been the thing’s back. There was a sighing noise, like wind through a grate, and the rain whirled around the burning corpse in a wild little vortex.

Argyle forced back his laughter, his joy. By God, he had done it!—deceived the Father of Lies, swindled the master swindler and got off scot-free. The Devil had taken it, lock, stock, and barrel.

“S
OME KIND OF WINDFALL
,” Lyle Boyd said, dipping cake doughnuts into pans of frosting. “About a quarter of a million from what I heard. Her and her boyfriend headed straight for Honolulu, booked a room at the Royal Hawaiian. I don’t guess she’ll
ever
be back.”

“What was it,” Walt asked, “inheritance?”

“Something like that.”

“How about her house over on Olive? She just lock the doors and go?”

“Realtor’s selling it for her.” Boyd scraped frosting off the big wooden breadboard with a spatula. “She’ll make a couple of bucks there too. She owned that, you know.”

“She
owned
it?” Walt said incredulously. “I had the idea she was just about broke, living on macaroni and cheese.”

“Hell,” Boyd said. “That’s what she let on. She sold that place of hers in the Islands and outright
bought
the house here in town. Then she started to regret it right off. She was always pining away for the tropics. Anyway, I imagine she’ll clear another hundred thousand on it, all told. She’s a rich woman, at least by my standards.”

“I’ll be damned,” Walt said, looking out the window at the cloudy afternoon sky. “I guess you never know.”

“That’s the truth.”

A man and four kids came in the door just then, and Walt nodded at the man, then winked at one of the boys, who had to be about Nora’s age. The boy’s eyes shot open and he ducked behind his father, looking out at Walt from behind the man’s leg.

Walt turned around and grinned at Henry, who tried to grin back, but couldn’t. His face was full of trouble.

“What’s wrong?” Walt asked. “You’re not thinking about Maggie Biggs, are you? It’s almost funny, the way she took us to the cleaners. And now she’s dancing the hula with Don Ho. Bentley’s going to drop dead when he hears about it.”

Henry waved his hand. “I guess so,” he said.

“What I wonder is where she got the money. I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that she shook somebody down, and I’ll bet you it was Argyle, too. She had something on him, her and Peetenpaul.”

Henry nodded weakly. “I don’t …” He stopped, gesturing helplessly.

“What’s up?” Walt asked.

“I think I know how she got the money out of Argyle.”

“How? She blackmailed him?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“What gives, then? She didn’t involve
you
in it, did she? She didn’t leave you holding the bag and skip town?”

“No, not like that. Worse, I guess. She threatened to go to Jinx again. And more. I … I couldn’t let her. I was afraid.”

“So … ?”

“So I stole that damned bird of yours. You look in the tackle box and it won’t be there.”

Walt blinked at him. So that was it. “I guess you figured out that I’d gotten it back out of the Dumpster?”

“Next day. Maggie told me all about these men who wanted the bird—what they’d do to get it. To tell you the truth, I thought it was in the can anyway, so I played along. Then when it was gone, when I knew you’d gotten it out of the bin, I figured it had this … this
hold
over you, and somehow that gave me the right to steal it. That was wrong. None of us has any right to another man’s possessions. We can make up whys and wherefores till the cows come home, but all of it’s lies we tell ourselves to justify our sins. That’s what I think. Anyway, I gave the bird to Maggie, and Maggie cut a deal with these men.”

Walt nodded at him, thinking about this. As usual, Henry was right. “It was the wrong bird,” Walt said to him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You gave her a fake. The bird in the tackle box was a dead parakeet in a Mason jar. It was a dummy. The real bird’s … I took care of the real one.”

Henry sat there silently for a moment, thinking this out. “It hardly matters, morally speaking,” he said finally. “I thought I was stealing the real McCoy. This doesn’t make it right.”

“Maybe not,” Walt said, “but the way I see it, you tried to do the right thing, and more than once, too. I wish you
had
stolen the real one.”

There was laughter behind them, and the man with the kids was pushing out through the door again. “I’d stay out of that alley, anyway,” he said over his shoulder to Boyd, “unless you’ve got an asbestos suit.” He laughed again, and the door swung shut behind them.

Boyd shook his head and squirted Windex on the top of the glass doughnut case. “How do you like that?” he said. “What?” Walt waited.

“That guy that burned up in the alley last night? It was an effigy.”

“A Fiji?” Henry asked, picking up his coffee cup. “Well, I’ll be go to Hell. That’s tough on an immigrant. They come over here looking for the American dream….” He shook his head sadly. “Wasn’t there a Samoan family over on Harwood Street? Big people, I seem to remember. I wonder if they knew this man, poor devil.”

“I said an
effigy
,” Boyd told him. “A dummy. Fire department got there and apparently this thing was made up out of dirt and sticks and melted wax and crap like that. Patrick just told me it had a goddamn
bird
in its mouth. Some kind of prank, I guess.”

“Sure sounds like it,” Walt said. “Heading home?” he asked Henry.

“I think I’ll sit for a while. I told Jinx I’d go Christmas shopping downtown. I’ll have another cup of coffee first.”

“I’ll drop you.”

“I can use the walk.”

Walt stood up and drained his coffee cup. “I guess I better roll, then. I’ve got some unfinished business.” He couldn’t help thinking about what Argyle had said about rising out of the ashes like a phoenix. There was something unlikely in the picture. They didn’t let just anybody be a phoenix. You had to qualify.

W
ALT FORCED THE SPADE
down into the wet dirt with his heel, digging out a wide hole. He didn’t want to cut the bluebird in half. It wasn’t his to cut. He shook the heavy clods off the shovel and knocked them apart, but there was no sign of the bird, so he dug out another shovelful. Still there was nothing. Maybe the bird was so dirty it didn’t look like a bird any more…. He moved the loose dirt around in the hole. The bird
couldn’t
be deeper. He was already down into soil that hadn’t been turned over in years.

He rejected the first notion that came into his mind—that Argyle had come back and stolen it after all. He had found the shovel exactly where he’d left it, and the filled-in hole had looked as he remembered, tamped down with the shovel and then stomped on. He prodded around some more, working the shovel carefully, slicing away at the edges of the hole. A patch of dirt suddenly loosened and fell outward, exposing the mouth of a neat, round tunnel. A gopher hole! Apparently a gopher had dragged the bird away.

Getting down onto his hands and knees, he peered into the little tunnel, but it was perfectly dark and he could see nothing. He dug out another shovel of dirt, and then another, following the hole until it disappeared under his neighbor’s garage. He hacked away at it sideways, under the old slab floor, more determined than ever to drag it out of there. He had never intended to leave it buried, and he was damned if he was going to let it hang around and demonize the neighbor’s garage.

He threw the shovel down finally and went after the flashlight, fetching it outside where he knelt in the dirt again and shined the light into the hole. It ended a foot farther on. The bird lay jammed against the back end of the tunnel, as limp and dead-looking as ever, but shiny blue, as if the dirt wouldn’t stick to it. There was no gopher to be seen, no outlet to the hole. The faint smell of gin hung in the air.

He was abruptly certain that nothing had dragged the bird into the tunnel. It had somehow burrowed its way under there itself, going somewhere under its own power….

Its wing twitched suddenly, and there was a papery sound, like dry corn husks in a sack. Walt jerked backward, averting his face, fearful that the bird would fly out at him, that it would escape into the evening gloom like a demon out of Pandora’s box. He crammed the flashlight into the hole, stopping it up, and went into the house after the fireplace tongs. He carried the tongs into the garage, where he found a nearly empty pint-size paint can. He pried the lid off and poured the paint out, then he hurried back outside, carrying the can and a hammer, and took the flashlight out of the hole. He felt around gingerly with the tongs until he found the bird. Carefully he dragged it out into the open and peered at it in the waning light.

It seemed to vibrate in the tongs, as if it were charged with an infernal energy, and its eyes were clear and bright and focused on Walt’s face, as if it were as interested in him as he was in it.

A picture slowly formed in Walt’s mind, like a flower opening up. He saw Maggie Biggs sitting in her suite at the Royal Hawaiian, looking out over Waikiki and sipping a Mai Tai, watching the afternoon waves reel in over the reef. A leather valise lay open on the hotel bed, neatly filled with bills. Mr. Peetenpaul stood on the balcony in his aloha shirt. Far beyond him, the steep green sides of Diamond Head rose against a sky as blue as the feathers of the bluebird itself. The lazy strains of Polynesian music, steel guitars and soft voices, drifted on the trade wind. There was the smell of blossoms on the air, as clear and heavy as if Walt wore a lei around his own neck.

He looked across at the tin shed, empty of anything but dry Christmas trees, at the garage with its pitiful inventory of gag gifts, and suddenly he saw himself crumpling up Argyle’s check, throwing it out onto the lawn, paying heavily for his principles. The bluebird peered into his face. Its eyes were full of possibility, full of suggestion. There was the sound of thunder, a rumbling echo that went on and on.

Speak any wish, he thought, remembering the promise on the little bit of folded paper that had accompanied the thing….

H
E WAS STARTLED
out of his reverie by the sound of bells, ringing out an evening hymn. Six o’clock. It was the bells at the Holy Spirit. It was raining again, and obviously had been. Somehow he hadn’t noticed. And he was surprised to see that darkness had fallen, that his arms were weary from holding the tongs, which were clamped like a vise around the bluebird’s neck.

“Go to Hell,” he said to it.

Then he dropped the bird like a plumb bob into the paint can, set the lid over it, and pounded it down tight. He took it back into the garage, where he crisscrossed the lid with duct tape, then headed out toward the street to where the Suburban was parked. There was a thumping noise from within the can, as if the thing were angry, and he hammered it against the steering wheel a couple of times to shut it up. He started the engine, switched on the wipers and angled away from the curb, heading toward Argyle’s house in the downpour.

A
RGYLE LOOKED OUT THE
window at the dark street. Rain was falling again, heavily now. It was going to be a hell of a stormy night. Well, let it storm! He stepped across and put Edward Elgar on the stereo. Carrying the record jacket with him, he sat down in the chair that Bentley had torn up with the poker. When it came to music he still preferred vinyl to tape or compact disc, and over the years that his records had sat in their sleeves unplayed, he had kept them organized and perfectly shelved. Now he could play them again, by God, and he aimed to work through them steadily, savoring them, starting with “Pomp and Circumstance,” which seemed somehow appropriate, given his success with the golem.

He felt like a new man. He
was
a new man. It was damned good to have the golem out of the house at last, to have this whole sorry episode finished. It was a brand-new day. He picked up a glass on the table, a piece of cut crystal with an inch of bourbon in the bottom. Bourbon was his one great vice, although he never allowed himself more than a single glass. Swirling the whiskey, he held it under his nose and breathed in the vapors, then set the glass back down onto the tiled tabletop without tasting it. There was plenty of time to drink it.