“Do it now,” Henry said. “You wanted my opinion? Well, that’s it. Get it out of here. Posthaste.”
“Sure,” Walt said. He put the jar back into its tin and laid the tin carefully in the bucket, picking the whole works up by the handle. Henry walked down the street with him, to the alley adjacent to the medical center. The bin was about half full. Walt dropped the tin in among tied-off plastic bags and jumbled papers and office trash.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Henry said.
Walt reached in and yanked a trash bag over it so that no one would find it and fall prey to it as he had. He upended the tin bucket, dumping the rest of it in. By noon tomorrow the whole works would be landfill.
36
“THE KIDS ARE tired out tonight,” Walt said hopefully, watching Ivy move around the bedroom, hanging clothes and straightening up. She looked at him, seeing through him immediately.
It was past ten, and things were blessedly quiet downstairs. Apparently the kids had finally settled in. Walt was a little disappointed that they hadn’t given much of a damn for the Christmas trees in the shed. They’d gone inside and looked, but stepped right out again, as if they thought this was another spider prank or something. “Why are there trees?” Nora had asked.
“You can play in there, if you want,” Walt had answered, and right then Eddie had suddenly remembered that there was something on television, and he had run back into the house without saying a word, not coming back out again. Nora had gone into the front yard and drawn hopscotch squares on the sidewalk with pink chalk and spent fifteen minutes hopping up and down on one foot. Then, over dinner, Nora had told Aunt Jinx that Walt had tried to make them “go into the shed,” and Walt had found himself explaining about the forest of trees while Jinx regarded him with a look of astonishment and doubt.
“You and the kids …” Ivy said now, shaking her head and closing the wardrobe door. “You’ve gone head over heels.”
“Well …” Walt said, trying to get to the bottom of the statement, which sounded loaded to him, like an attractive piece of fish bait. “It’s fun having the two of them as house-guests. You can spoil them, whatever you want, and then give them back to their parents and go on your way.”
Ivy was silent. “I hope so … Wherever their parents are at the moment. I guess I ought to call Mom and Dad and see how Darla’s doing.” She sat down on her side of the bed. “What I meant, though, is that I think you’ve got a knack for it, for parenthood.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Walt said. “There’s a lot you give up.”
“There’s more that you gain. They both think you’re a peach.”
He shrugged. She nudged him in the ribs and winked at him, and he knew that this was her round; she’d out-scored him. There was no need to accuse him of fear or of being self-centered tonight. It was enough that the kids thought he was a peach. She’d caught him in a vanity trap.
“You didn’t tell me that it was one of Argyle’s pre-schools,” he said to her, changing the subject.
“It was the only one nearby that allowed for drop-ins and temporaries in the kindergarten class.” She shut off the lamp now, so that the room was dim, the only illumination coming from the light in the downstairs landing. “Did you speak to Robert?”
“Robert?” he asked. “Oh, you mean Argyle. Only for a second. To tell you the truth, he looked like hell, like he’d been worked over by midgets. I’m not just making this up to give him a hard time. I’d have to guess that he’d been drinking hard. He stank too, like he had some kind of bladder disease.”
“He didn’t look like that when I saw him at ten.” “Obviously he’d been at it all night,” Walt said. “Probably put away a couple of fifths. He went home and cleaned himself up for his meeting with you.”
“He said to give you his best. He was full of nostalgia, I think, for old times.”
“His best,” Walt said flatly. “How good is that, exactly?”
“Maybe it’s better than you think it is.”
Walt kept silent, thinking of Argyle out navigating the late-night streets, vandalizing houses. There was no use arguing about him, though. He wasn’t worth it, especially if it meant exposing any of this business with the bluebird, which, happily, was a thing of the past, now that the bird was in the Dumpster.
“He even talked about how he missed having children, never getting married.”
“You talked to him about personal matters?” Walt asked. “About having children?” This was astonishing. “I don’t suppose you discussed me? Us?”
“No. And don’t get riled up. This was a business meeting. How much do you think the commission is?”
“Never mind the commission. I can’t believe you talked about something like that. What business is it of his?”
“We didn’t talk about it. He mentioned it in passing.” She slid farther under the covers, turning toward him and leaning her head on her elbow. Her kimono fell open, and she casually straightened it, but when it fell partly open again, she left it alone. “I couldn’t be a creep to him, could I?”
“It wouldn’t be all that hard.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I should have been. Never mind about the commission, like you said. Money, who needs it? Filthy lucre.” She ran her finger down the sleeve of his nightshirt and off the tip of his finger. “I like a man in a nightshirt,” she said. “Especially a big roomy one.”
“I don’t know where you’ll find a big roomy man this time of night,” Walt said, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “But maybe I can be of service.”
“Maybe.”
“How much is the commission?” he asked, kissing her on the nose.
“It’s nothing, really. Let’s pretend I didn’t even bring it up. I’ll throw it back in his face tomorrow. I’ll call him names, too. What shall I call him? A skunk?” She raised her eyebrows, then pushed herself up on her elbow and kissed him on the lips. “I’ll call him a damned skunk, and then I’ll tweak his nose for him and box his ears. I always wanted to box a man’s ears.”
“Tell me.”
“Maybe I’ll tweak your nose too.”
“You won’t have me unless you tell,” Walt said. But he slid his hand into her kimono and let it drift across her belly.
She lay down again, batting her eyes at him. “I bet I will,” she said, and pulled his head down, kissing him again. “I bet I’ll have you right now.”
He had suddenly run out of things to say. He kissed her, slipping his hand down and loosening the tie on the kimono. She ran her fingers down his spine, putting her other arm across his shoulders.
And right then she sat up, clutching shut the kimono and pulling up the covers. He started to speak, but she put her finger to her lips.
“Listen,” she said.
He heard it then, the sound of movement downstairs. There was the patter of feet coming across the dining-room floor, heading toward the landing. It sounded like both of them. Soft footsteps sounded on the stair runner, and Nora and Eddie burst into the bedroom. Nora was breathless and wide-eyed, sobbing with fear.
“What’s wrong?” Walt asked. Was someone downstairs? A prowler—the inspector! This had gone too damned far! He’d kill anyone who scared Nora and Eddie. Argyle! The dirty son-of-a-bitch … Walt was full of adrenaline, worked up, wild with it.
“A b-bug,” Nora said, her voice shaking.
“A b-bug?” Walt asked.
“It was big,” Eddie said. He held up his hand, illustrating with his thumb and forefinger. “Like this.”
Apparently the bug was several inches long. “Where was it?” Walt asked, calming down now.
“On the floor,” Eddie said. “It ran under Nora’s bed. It’s under there now.”
“Cockroach.” Ivy whispered the word in Walt’s ear. “Was it black?” Walt asked. “Like a beetle, sort of?” Eddie nodded.
“What is it?” Nora asked. “This house has bugs,” “Every house has bugs,” Walt said. “Bugs h
ave to have a place to live, too. Many of them are involved in fertilization. They’re part of God’s great plan.”
“I’d kill it,” Eddie said, “if I had a stick or something.”
“Uncle Walt will kill it,” Ivy said. “Won’t you, Uncle Walt? I bet it won’t take a minute. Bring a shoe along to smack it with. We don’t want it in the house.”
“Well, I would kill it,” Walt said, “except that I think I know this bug. It’s an Egyptian waterbug named … Smith. E. Hopkinson Smith. He’s very friendly. He was probably on his way to a party—to the ugly bug ball. You know, to find his friends. Was he carrying a bag of …”
Nora burst into tears again, gasping out a sob that emptied her lungs.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ivy said, giving him a look. “Not under Nora’s bed. I don’t think this could have been Smith.”
“Of course not,” Walt said. “This must be some other bug.” He could see he was defeated. Going on about bugs in trousers and top hats wouldn’t do him any good, not now. “I’ll go mash him,” he said, climbing out of bed.
Nora suddenly began giggling. Like that the sobbing was gone, evaporated.
“What?” Walt said.
“You have a dress,” she said, pointing.
“It’s a nightshirt,” Walt told her. “Aunt Jinx made it for me. It’s the family’s plaid, from Scotland.”
“It’s like a dress,” she said, climbing into his spot in bed and pulling the covers up to her chin so that only her head and her fingers showed. She made her rabbit face at him, crinkling up her eyes. Her bug fear was forgotten, just like that. Eddie sat down at the foot of the bed and yawned.
“Bring back the corpse,” Ivy said to him. “I’ll keep the children entertained.”
“No falling asleep?”
“Me?”
He gave her a hard look and descended the stairs, carrying a tennis shoe. Going into the service porch, he grabbed a flashlight and a broom, then headed for the kids’ room, where the light was on. Of course there was nothing under the bed. The roach, if that’s what it had been, had slipped away through a gap in the floor moldings or gone into the closet. There was no way it would show itself. He was damned if he was going to spend all night on this quest. Laying the broom down, he raised the tennis shoe over his head and slammed it against the floor a half dozen times, then went out into the living room and opened the front door, shutting it hard. He put back the broom and the light and went up the stairs again.
“Got it,” he said. The children lay side by side on the bed, looking at pictures in a magazine.
“Let’s see,” Nora said anxiously, sitting up.
“I pitched it out the front door,” Walt lied. “Didn’t you hear the door shut? I smashed him flatter than a molecule.”
Nora looked at him in silence, her mouth half open. “You said he’d show us,” she said to Ivy.
“He will,” Ivy said to her. She looked hard at Walt, seeing straight through him. “I think that Nora and Eddie will sleep better if they know the bug’s really, really dead,” she told him.
“I’m sleeping up here,” Nora said.
“No, you’re not,” Walt told her. “Everyone in their own beds.”
“What if it’s in my bed?” Nora asked. “What if it’s the bug again?”
“It is,” Eddie said. “I think it was a kind of bedbug.”
“I don’t think so,” Walt said.
“Maybe you could get its corpse,” Ivy said, “from wherever you threw it. That would settle things, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Walt said. “Of course it would.” He turned around and headed for the stairs again, still carrying his shoe, an idea suddenly coming to him. There were ten million roaches out on the streets at night, especially in the water meter box. He should have thought of that in the first place—not wasted his time looking for the actual bug. Any dead roach would do.
37
IT WAS CLOSE to eleven o’clock. Bentley and Mahoney had been out walking the empty streets of Old Towne for over an hour, ringing bells. It had rained off and on, but now the rain was off, and Bentley tapped the wet sidewalk with his umbrella as if it were a walking stick. The Benedictus bell that he held in his other hand kept up a constant ringing that should have set off half the dogs in the neighborhood, but for some curious reason it didn’t, as if the dogs understood.
Probably they should have split up, he and Mahoney, in order to cover more ground, except that alone they would be more open to attack. He looked behind him down the street, but it was deserted.
He relaxed and took in a lungful of the wet evening air. He liked to walk in the evening, especially in stormy weather, when he could see into softly lighted living rooms through open curtains: families sitting around warm and dry, watching television or reading, surrounded by the comfortable clutter of their lives. There were lighted Christmas trees in windows and cats on front porches and dogs looking out through screen doors, and it was easy to imagine that people were happy with simple things.
It wasn’t all that long ago that bell-ringing was a common enough evening ritual, and in past centuries no one would have questioned the power of church bells to drive off evil. In the old days the sound of consecrated bells would have been as comforting to good people as it was intolerable to monsters like Argyle and LeRoy. Things had changed.
But here was the pot calling the kettle black, Bentley thought: it was only in the last few weeks that he himself had come to suspect that the vandalizing of neighborhood church bells meant anything. In fact, until this past week he had never given a second thought to the ringing of church bells. The history of bells was Catholic history for the most part, which, at least to his way of thinking, meant that it was nearly as hard to separate it from superstition as it was to chew the wrinkles out of a piece of gum. And look at him now: here he was, hand in glove with a priest, out in the rainy night, ringing a Benedictus bell and with more bells tied to his belt like wind chimes.
“Look at that,” Mahoney said, pointing his umbrella at the shadows alongside a front porch. A big plastic snowman, meant to be illuminated, lay on the grass, its face smashed in as if someone had yanked it off the porch and jumped up and down on it. Its electrical cord was wrapped around its neck in a sort of noose.
“Another one,” Mahoney said. “Do you think it’s him again?”
“Either it’s him or …”
And just then, a car rolled slowly past the end of the block, heading east on Palm Street. It was the third time that evening that they’d seen it. The driver was a shadow, but it seemed to Bentley that the shadow was observing the two of them, and the preacher raised his umbrella as a greeting. The car sped up and was gone. Bentley didn’t recognize the car, but he was almost certain it wasn’t Argyle. The driver appeared to be a short man, maybe heavyset. Probably it was George Nelson, halfway to Hell in a hand-basket.
Bentley wondered again if he should have cashed the check that Argyle had given Obermeyer. Making the deal final—actually taking the money—might have stopped whatever it was that was coming to pass….
But that was nuts. Whatever was going on with Argyle had nothing to do with money, and it never had. A man could as easily sell his soul for a nickel as for five billion dollars, and you couldn’t put a price on salvation—or on damnation, either, he reminded himself.
“What makes you think this thing in a jar is a demon?” Father Mahoney asked.
“What else would it be?”
“Do you mean a demon out of Hell? Beelzebub or Belial or one of them? Something with a name?”
“Well, there’s no point in getting too specific about it. We don’t care about the thing’s credentials.”
“Why not something else?”
“What, exactly?”
“A bottle imp. A monkey’s paw. A genie.”
“I don’t believe in imps and genies. A demon’s a demon the world around, as far as I’m concerned. What I know is that something has come into the country
from the China coast, something Argyle has been waiting for. It was part of a shipment that included the golem, which I saw with my own eyes through the window. My sources believe this thing to be a demon, and I believe it to be a demon, and I believe that Argyle intends for this demon to ride his golem into Hell in order to give the Devil his due, which is to say, a soul. In a nutshell that’s what I think.”
“And it’s packaged as a toy?”
“Insidious, isn’t it? Looks fairly innocent, apparently—some kind of good-luck item. You make a wish on it like you’d wish on a rabbit’s foot or a star. Then it’s got you. Pulls you in by appealing to your desires. What it means is damnation, which is nothing to Argyle—he thinks he’s already damned.”
They turned the corner and headed up toward Cambridge. “It’s Stebbins that I’m worried about. I’m certain he’s got it, and that he’s lying when he says he doesn’t. Looting his garage won’t do us any good any more. He’ll have the thing hidden by now. There’s nothing left to do but confront him about it. We’ve got to appeal to his decency, and we’ve got to appeal to his fear.”
“Do you think he’ll listen?”
“No,” Bentley said. “I don’t suppose he will.”
38
THE MOTOR HOME was dark, thank goodness, and it wasn’t raining, although it smelled like rain, and the sky was heavy with clouds. Walt walked out to the curb and looked out into the street, where, on any other night of the year, there would have been a dozen roaches going about their senseless business. Tonight there was nothing; the streets were empty except for a few earthworms in the gutter. Somewhere in the distance there was the ringing of bells, small bells.
All the Bells on Earth Page 21
