Maybe he’d wait….
And anyway, he didn’t have a pen—Vest had taken it.
34
ON THE WALK in front of the Sprouse Reitz store on Chapman Avenue stood several dozen Christmas trees nailed onto the crossed sections of bisected two-by-fours. A scattering of over-the-hill trees had been piled off to one side, and a boy in a T-shirt was just then dragging two of them around the side of the building toward a big trash bin, leaving a wide trail of fallen needles on the wet asphalt behind him. Walt parked the Suburban near the trash bins and rolled down the window. “Throwing them out?” he asked.
An idea had come to him, an inspiration; why shouldn’t he take a few trees home, for the kids—maybe set up some kind of Black Forest under the avocado tree?
“They’re not really any good,” the boy said. His T-shirt had a picture of a trout on it, along with the words, “Fish worship, is it wrong?”
An eccentric, Walt thought, immediately liking him. He was right about the trees, too; they were pretty clearly shot—not dried out, but mangled, with lots of broken limbs and twigs.
“What will you sell them for?” Walt asked.
“They’re not really for sale. They just came in, but most of them are broken up like this because they fell off the truck or something. The supplier is going to refund our money for the wrecked ones. So … I don’t know.”
“So you’re throwing them away?”
He nodded toward the trash bin. “They compost them.”
“Well, I’ll take a few off your hands,” Walt said. “Say, ten bucks? I’ll compost the heck out of them later.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to sell them….”
“You’re not really selling them, are you? I need a few for a sort of…. theatrical production, for my niece and nephew. It’s hard to explain. I want to make a … a Christmas forest, I guess, in the backyard, around this garden shed, which would be the woodcutter’s cottage.”
The boy nodded, as if finally Walt was making sense. “How many do you want?” he asked.
“Let’s see … we can load a few on the rack here and then shove a couple more inside the truck. Whatever I can fit.” He dug his wallet out of his back pocket then and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Just drag a few more around here. If there’s any trouble I’ll say I was digging them out of the bin, and that you tried to stop me but I wouldn’t listen.”
He handed the money to the boy, who dropped the two trees he’d been holding onto, took the bill, and stuffed it into his pocket. Walt got out of the Suburban, picked up a tree, and lifted it onto the rack, swiveling the two parts of the wooden base together. He loaded the second tree back-to-front with the first, then took a roll of twine from the back of the truck and tied the trees down, yanking them flat so that he could fit more on top. Finally he opened the tailgate and crammed two more inside. Even tied down, the trees added about six feet to the top of the truck, which looked like some kind of specially camouflaged alpine vehicle.
“Thanks,” he said, handing the twine back and putting away his pocketknife. “Can I give you a hand with the rest of them? I really appreciate this.”
“I guess not,” the boy said. “Thanks for the ten dollars.”
Walt headed into the store, feeling lucky. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do with the trees, other than that it involved Nora and Eddie. There was too much rain to set up the trees outside, now that he thought about it. And there was no way Ivy would let him drag them all into the house. What was that play, he wondered, in which the old man ended up living in an attic full of Christmas trees? It involved ducks, Walt seemed to remember—ducks and garden elves. Walt admired that kind of who-cares-what-you-think lunacy, but it seemed to him to be the special province of either the very young or the very old. A man his age had to watch out.
He looked over the Christmas ornaments on the way into the store, picking out a couple of strings of illuminated candycanes suitable for hanging outdoors. He could decorate the porch with them. Then Argyle could come around and smash them to pieces with a stick. It would be an Argyle trap, a sort of monkey-and-coconut effect. Walt could watch through the upstairs window, and when Argyle really got going, Walt could point him out to Ivy: “Look, isn’t that poor old Bob Argyle dancing on the candycanes … ?”
“Aren’t those fun?” a woman asked him.
He looked up and nodded. She stood near one of the registers, an open bag of popcorn sitting on the Formica counter in front of her. Her wispy hair was blue-gray, and she wore a frilly kind of calico apron. The smell of popcorn was heavy in the store, and Walt noticed a big popping machine near the candy counter. “I’m taking two strings,” Walt said.
“Good for you,” she said, full of good cheer. Walt was apparently the only customer in the store.
“Tell me,” he said to her, wishing that she didn’t look quite so much like somebody’s nice old granny. “I notice that you sell parakeets.”
“That’s right,” she said. “They’re at the back of the store, in the corner, past yardage. Pick one out and we’ll get Andrew in here to catch it.”
“Well, what I need,” Walt said, “and this is going to sound weird, is a dead one.”
The idea had come to him after he and Henry had gotten home from Coco’s: he would give Argyle the dead bird after all, or at least a dead bird. He’d give it to him in ajar, too, filled with gin. “I’d be happy to pay full price,” Walt told the woman. This involves—what do you call it?—a science fair project. Dissection. One of these eighth-grade science projects …”
… and it occurred to him that he might simply have asked the bluebird itself, up in the rafters, to supply him with another bluebird, a facsimile.
The idea simply leaped into his mind, like a suddenly appearing ghost. Almost at once he wondered if he could make a request like that at a distance, if the bird would grant it anyway, even though it was locked in a fishing tackle box in the rafters of a garage two miles away.
Abruptly he cast the idea out. I don’t want your help, he thought forcibly.
“Well,” the woman said, “it happens that I do have a dead parakeet. We sell a good number of birds, and once in a while we lose one.”
He winced. Success, just like that. Had the bluebird granted his wish? Did the mere thought command the thing’s obedience? “Parakeets can be delicate,” he said to the woman, trying to smile, to show his appreciation.
“Well, this one had some kind of cold. We separated him from the others and then dosed all of them with vitamins and antibiotics, but the poor thing died just this afternoon. I didn’t know quite what to do with him. It didn’t seem right just to toss him into the trash.”
Walt nodded sympathetically, following her toward the back of the store, past yardage displays and racks of notions and gizmos. She brought the bird out of the storeroom in a shoebox, lying in a little bed of tissue paper. It was blue, all right—bluebird blue.
“So it’s been dead for a while?” Walt asked.
“A couple of hours. I didn’t want to just throw it in the bin.”
“Of course not.” Two hours ago! That settled it. The bluebird couldn’t have anticipated his wish. Could it? The idea was absurd, no matter how much the parakeet looked like the bird in the jar. Which it did, Walt realized, looking closely at it. No, it was impossible. This was outright coincidence.
“How much can I pay you for him?” he asked, getting out his wallet.
She waved the suggestion aside and rang up the two strings of candycane lights.
“If you’re sure,” he said. Somehow he had counted on being able to pay for it. There was something almost immoral about it otherwise, what with the lie and all.
“Tell your son that I hope he gets an A on his project,” she said.
“I will.” Walt felt like a criminal. He took his package and the shoebox and went out into the rain. Somehow the act of lying to the woman had taken all the wind out of his sails, and the prank he intended to play
on Argyle wasn’t nearly as funny to him any more. The boy in the parking lot was tossing out the last of the trees when Walt came out, and he waved as Walt fired up the Suburban and drove slowly out toward the street.
After stopping at the liquor store for a pint of gin, he drove home and unloaded the trees into the new tin shed, intending to turn it into Nora and Eddie’s own private forest. He rolled out a piece of green indoor-outdoor carpet and then stood the trees up in two rows so that their branches interlaced. Somehow the whole process wasn’t as much fun as he had anticipated. He felt a little weary, as if weighted down by the idea of dead birds and by the tangle of lies that was like a net dropped over his head.
With a pruning clippers he removed the bottom limbs and the worst of the broken twigs. By now the shed smelled like a pine woods. He stood for a moment simply breathing it in, listening to the freshening rain beat down on the roof, then slid shut the shed door and went into the house. Jinx and Ivy were out, and apparently hadn’t been home all day, since the mail still lay on the coffee table where Walt had tossed it earlier.
He noticed then that a folded sheet of paper lay on the living-room floor beneath the mail slot. He picked it up and pried out the staple. It was a Xeroxed flyer, hand done, offering a reward for a “lost carton” possibly dropped from a mail truck in the neighborhood….
A thousand dollars would be paid for the carton’s return, no questions asked.
35
ON THE FLYER there was a description of the thing in the jar, which—the flyer claimed—was the corpse of a now-extinct sort of Chinese sparrow bound ultimately for the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.
Walt laughed out loud. A thousand dollars! At that rate he would hand the thing over after all and hoot in Argyle’s face.
Except, of course, that handing it over would establish his guilt. And there was no way on earth Argyle would pay him the money anyway, not now.
The more he thought about it, the more it smelled like a plot—probably something set up by the inspector. The extinct sparrow talk was obviously a lie. The bird was something else altogether, something that was clearly worth a lot more than a thousand dollars. Suddenly a thought occurred to him and he went outside again, heading next door, carrying the flyer with him. He checked with three of his neighbors before he was satisfied that nobody else on the block had gotten one—only him.
So this was a sting operation. They expected him to come panting along with the jar after having lied to a postal inspector. Probably that constituted some kind of vicious fraud.
Except of course that the postal inspector was himself a vicious fraud. Walt went up the driveway to lock up the garage, wondering idly whether two frauds canceled each other out. He crumpled the flyer and tossed it into the tin bucket, then stepped back and looked into the rafters. The tackle box sat up there as ever, gathering dust. The bird was in it. Somehow Walt knew that without having to check, as if the thing had a presence—exactly as if something were living up there in the dusty shadows beneath the roof beam, something small but with immense mass, so terribly heavy that the rafters groaned beneath its weight, and at any moment it would come smashing down. The idea of it gave him the willies.
A few hours earlier he had been on the verge of asking the thing for money. But he knew it was better to throw it into the ocean. His sudden fear of it in Sprouse Reitz had been healthy—sanity itself. He walked down the driveway to the motor home and knocked. Henry opened the door, saw who it was, and waved him in. Walt slid behind the table, looking out through the window at the rain. Henry’s little space heater whirred away on the sink, and the trailer was close and warm.
“Coffee?” Henry asked, shutting off the television.
“Thanks,” Walt said, taking the cup from him. “Rain won’t quit.”
“It gives people something to talk about,” Henry said.
“Weather. That’s the king of small talk.”
Henry shrugged. “Everyone’s interested in it. It’s common ground.”
“It’s safe, I guess.”
“Nothing safe about the weather. On the television they were just showing some homes out near Portuguese Bend—slid right into the ocean.”
“I meant as a topic of conversation. You don’t get into trouble talking about the weather. It’s not like politics and religion.”
“That’s so,” Henry said. “It’s one of the only subjects people still give a damn for after ten thousand years of civilization. And it doesn’t matter where you find yourself, Egypt, Peru, hell—China, for God’s sake. People all over the world talk the same talk when they talk about the weather. It’s the great leveler, the only thing time won’t change in people. It’s the same with food and drink. There’s nothing small about any of that kind of talk.”
Walt blinked at the old man, who dumped several spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and stirred it up. Somehow this all sounded tremendously sane, a side of Henry that Walt wasn’t familiar with. The old man was apparently in a philosophical mood. He had come down off the wild buzz he’d been on at Coco’s.
“Let me ask you something,” Walt said, suddenly deciding to confide in Henry. “This is going to sound a little nuts, but did you ever have any interest in … what do you want to call it? Magic, let’s say. Ouija boards, Tarot cards, that sort of thing?”
He nodded. “Gladys used to read cards.”
“Really, Aunt Gladys?”
“Terrible bore. She was always showing you the horoscope, too, warning you about things, giving you advice.”
“You believe in any of it?”
“Believe in it?” Henry shook his head. “I don’t know about believe. I know I don’t like it much.”
“Neither do I,” Walt said. “What would happen, though, if Aunt Gladys was reading your cards, and you started to think there was something to it after all, as if the cards weren’t just pictures any more, but really were … windows, say. That Gladys was actually communicating with something?”
“I’d walk right out of there.” Henry nodded for emphasis, setting his jaw. “I’d say, ‘Gladys, you’ve gone crazy.’
“Well, this is interesting,” Walt said, “because the damnedest thing has happened. I wonder what you’ll think about it. I got this shipment, from Asia….”
Walt explained the bluebird, leaving Argyle out of the picture entirely and saying nothing about newspaper delivery or tomatoes or anything else that would make him seem certifiable. The details of the story seemed almost trivial now that he was recounting them, and he realized that the fear he had felt in the garage a few minutes ago had evaporated. “The thing is,” Walt said at last, “what if it can grant your wishes?”
“Then you’ve got to get it out of here. And I mean now. Otherwise I’ve got to tell you the same thing I’d tell Gladys. I’d say, Walter, you’ve gone crazy.”
“But what if there’s a million dollars in it?”
“What if there’s ten million dollars? It’ll buy you the same thing—ruination. A ticket straight to Hell in an upholstered sedan chair. Bank on it. You’ll ride to the Devil in comfort. Anyway, I’ve never pegged you as the kind of man who had his price.”
“Well, thanks,” Walt said. “You want to have a look at it?”
“I’d be glad to,” Henry said. “I’m happy to help.” He set down his coffee cup and took his sweater from a hook on the trailer wall. Together they went into the garage, and Walt climbed up into the rafters and pulled down the tackle box, setting it down on the bench and unclipping the lid.
“This is it,” Walt said. He took the jar out of its painted tin box and held it up to the light. The milky gin-water inside swirled around the corpse of the bird, and the surface of the liquid was agitated, as if the jar held a miniature, white-capped sea.
“It’s apparently a dead bird,” Henry said. “Nasty-looking fellow.”
Walt nodded, suppressing the urge to argue with him. The bird was actually a fairly beautiful specimen, the blue as bright as an afterno
on sky. Abruptly he wished that he’d never brought the subject up to Henry at all. This was something he could handle on his own. He didn’t need help. He set the jar on the bench and said offhandedly, “Like I said, it’s supposed to grant wishes. It’s some kind of charm, like a rabbit’s foot. I don’t know why I brought it up, really.”
Henry looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Throw it straight into the trash,” he said. “That’s no rabbit’s foot.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“There’s something not right about it, some kind of juju. Get it the hell out of here. You don’t want something like this around.”
“No,” Walt said. “That’s right. That’s why I wanted to show it to you, to get your opinion on it.” “Does Ivy know about it?” “Know about it? No, I guess not.”
“Take my word for it. Don’t show it to her. Get rid of it, somewhere off the property. If I showed Jinx a thing like this …” He shook his head and reached into the open tackle box, pulling out a bottle of salmon eggs. “What is this supposed to be, fish bait?”
Walt took it from him. Something was wrong with the eggs in the bottle. They were moving, as if swimming sluggishly in the gelatinous pink liquid. Walt looked closely at them, horrified to see that they were looking back out at him through round black eyes the size of flyspecks, and that each had a tail and fins, almost transparent. The jar pulsed in his hands, and he had the odd feeling that the sides of the jar bulged, that at any moment it would burst, spewing larvae through the air of the garage like a pod spewing out seeds.
“Damn thing’s full of maggots,” he said, rolling the jar into several sheets of newspaper and twisting the ends before putting it in the trash bucket. He saw that the old bottle of cheese bait had turned a purple-black, like the color of a bruise, and he threw that into the trash, too, without looking at it closely. “I’ll toss it all into the Dumpster down behind the medical center on the corner.” He nodded seriously at Henry and picked up the bluebird, started to put it into the bucket too, but then stopped and set it on the bench again. “What’s tomorrow—Thursday? The bin doesn’t get emptied till late in the afternoon, so I can toss it out in the morning.”
All the Bells on Earth Page 20
