All the Bells on Earth

by James P. Blaylock

  Suddenly there came into his mind a picture of Nora bringing the shackled Argyle a cup of water, a look of profound sadness on her face. Instantly he was ashamed of himself. He unclutched his hand and dropped the twenties onto the floor.

  For a moment there he’d gone nearly crazy! That’s what Henry had been talking about! He took a deep breath. Well, to hell with that. He would leave the bills right there on the floor, like lucky pennies, for somebody else to find. He would walk away from them, from the whole shebang. From now on he’d despise wealth like a Hindu.

  And this time he wouldn’t just throw the damned jar in the bin either; he’d break it to pieces, dump the gin out onto the ground, put the bluebird in a paint can and pound the lid down and haul it out to the dump where he’d pitch it under the wheels of an earth-moving vehicle.

  Yes, his mind was made up for good and all, and he felt suddenly better. A minute ago he’d been drunk with anticipation, with the love of money, but now he saw the futility in it. He looked at the twenties scattered at his feet….

  What the hell, there was no reason not to take them after all, a pitiful little sum like that. But thank God he hadn’t asked for the sixty million! Sixty dollars was different. It was simply the money he was owed from yesterday. How could there be any sin in breaking even? He didn’t look for an answer.

  “Well, for the love of Mike,” someone said just then, “it’s starting to look like the whole damn gang!”

  The voice belonged unmistakably to Mrs. Biggs. Walt bent over now and picked up the twenties, then turned slowly around. It was her, all right. She stood grinning at him, holding onto the Reverend Bentley through the crook of his arm. Bentley looked like hell, unshaven, his hair a wreck, eyes bloodshot, and wearing the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. He scowled and shook his head hard at Walt, as if to deny whatever Walt was thinking.

  “Look who I found in the lot,” Mrs. Biggs said. “I said to myself, ‘Maggie, there’s the Reverend, stopping in for a fifth, and it’s just coming on to eight o’clock, too.’ But now I see you’ve beat him to it. Early bird gets the snort, eh? You starting a fresh bender, or finishing one up?”

  “Neither,” Walt said. “I stopped in to run a Lotto ticket.”

  She looked at the money in his hand. “Well then, hand it over,” she said, “since it turns out you’ve pretty much wrecked my stove.”

  Walt gaped at her.

  “That’s right. I had my friend Mr. Peet in last night and he says it’ll cost sixty dollars to fix it. He tells me the gas company won’t touch it because it’s buggered up. You apparently done something to it, which Mr. Peet explained. I misremember what, except that it was sixty dollars’ worth.”

  “I didn’t do anything to it,” Walt said, “except clean out the pipes. Sixty dollars!” Of course this was probably a lie. Mr. Pete was a pipe dream, a figment, pure downtown hosery. She’d seen that he was holding three twenties, so that’s how much the whole thing was going to cost, to the penny. Good thing Walt hadn’t won the sixty million; he’d be handing that over.

  She nodded slowly, fixing him with a sad look, but he held out against her. And when she spoke again her voice was small, as if she had finally given up, thrown in the towel. “It’s that way, is it?” she said.

  “What way?” Walt asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “I kind of figured you were made of stronger stuff. I thought you had some backbone. I guess I’m a bad judge of character, although I never would have thought so….” She dropped Bentley’s arm. “Go on Reverend, buy your hootch and skedaddle. Both of you. I’m through with the whole bunch of you.”

  “I suggest we take her at her word,” Bentley said, gesturing toward the door. “I just stopped in after some coffee filters, actually, and then I’m on my way.”

  “Yessir,” Mrs. Biggs said, wiping at her eyes now and turning to Toni, who was working over the bottles with a feather duster. “Do you have a tissue, dearie?”

  “Oh, for … !” Bentley said. “A public display! This is a disgrace!”

  Toni hauled out a tissue box from under the counter, and Mrs. Biggs took one and dabbed her eyes. “Yesterday these two went to work on my old O’Keefe and Merritt,” she said to Toni, “and I said to myself, ‘Now there’s a couple of samaritans!’ That’s just what I said. And what came of it? You’d never guess.” Toni shook her head. “Rubbage.” Mrs. Biggs said, and she nodded hard, making her point. “I didn’t mind lighting that old stove with a match, did I? I’d been lighting it that way for years. And now they’ve fixed it, as they say, and I can’t light it at all, or it’ll blow up. This tribe comes in for a cup of tea, and now my stove’s broke, my cow pitcher’s broke, my car’s broke. Another hour and I suppose they’d have finished me off. Maybe it’d be better if they had.” She put her face in her hands and started to cry “Sixty dollars worth of grief!” she said.

  Toni handed her another tissue.

  “And the old man!” Mrs. Biggs said, looking up sharply and shaking the tissue at Walt. “That sweet-talking old devil. I guess everyone might as well know about him. Lord knows I trusted that man!” She glanced unmistakably at the money in Walt’s hand again. Then she turned her head sideways so that Toni couldn’t see her and winked at him—a shameless, greedy wink.

  “Here,” Walt said, instantly handing over the money. Clearly this was simply a matter of payola. She wasn’t going to shut up otherwise. She meant to drag Henry’s name through the mud right then and there.

  “And what about my automobile?” she asked Walt, suddenly forgetting about Henry.

  “I’ve got the hoses in the car. Let’s get to work. We’re burning daylight standing around here.” He headed toward the door. “Thanks,” he said to Toni.

  Outside, he saw right off that something was wrong with the Suburban, which sat at an angle in its parking space, as if the back end had been slammed sideways a couple of feet. Walt strode across to the far side. The rear fender was caved in, and the end of the bumper, the last four inches or so, was bent all to hell. Someone had clobbered the truck and taken off. “Hell,” Walt said.

  “You’ll just have to be a little soldier about it,” Mrs. Biggs said to him. “There’s worse things that can happen to a person.”

  “That’s the truth,” Bentley said.

  “Well,” Mrs. Biggs said, “another country heard from. I’ve got a couple of items on my list for you, too, Reverend.”

  “Not this morning,” Bentley said.

  “Why?” she asked. “What have you got to do that’s so all-fired important?”

  “Sleep,” Bentley said. “You’ll have to count me out.”

  “You mean Henry’ll have to count you out, don’t you? There’s friendship for you. If it involves work, the Reverend’s got to sleep. I saw that yesterday, the way you handled that mop.”

  “What I mean is that I was up all night long and nearly burned alive in a fire.”

  “Well, get used to it,” she said. “That’s pretty much the whole program down in perdition.”

  54

  IT WAS PAST noon when Walt loaded his tools into the Suburban and fired up the engine, sitting there for a moment to let it warm up. At least he had gotten the radiator fixed before the rain started up—although he hadn’t gotten a chance to help Bentley scrub out the trash cans with bleach and a broom; Bentley had cleaned the cans by himself after coming back from the beauty supply store up on Main Street. The rain had nearly drowned him before he was done.

  Walt’s sixty dollars was more than gone. He had gone down to the automated teller around eleven and pulled out sixty more. Right now Mrs. Biggs had groceries enough for a month, a couple of rented movies for the VCR, and a new cow pitcher that Bentley had found down at Stiffworthy’s Antiques. Tomorrow Wait was supposed to come around and look over the garbage disposal, which had shut down and wouldn’t reset. The plumber had apparently said it was just a loose wire….

  Along with that, one of the garage door hinges was s
prung, the crawl space screens under the house had to be replaced because possums were getting in, and in the bedroom there was a leaky window that “wanted putty.” And as soon as the rain let up, according to Mrs. Biggs, someone could get on with the work of scraping the eaves so the house could be repainted. She had hired a Mexican to do the work nearly a month ago, but the man had quit after half a day because he wasn’t satisfied with three dollars an hour and all the doughnuts he could eat. And, she’d told Walt, that was “under the table,” by which, Walt supposed, she meant the money.

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then turned on the defrost and pulled away from the curb, heading up Olive and then left on Palmyra, passing a house with a life-size Santa Claus and reindeer in the yard, the whole display vandalized—knocked down and defaced with graffiti. No doubt it was more of Argyle’s high jinks. He swung a left onto Glassell, back toward home. By his calculations he was down something like two hundred dollars total. Bentley was down another thirty for the cow pitcher, and it didn’t make him happy. Henry was going to pay them back with the lingerie money, except that the lingerie had never materialized, and, as of this morning anyway, Sidney Vest hadn’t returned any of Henry’s calls.

  “Henry’s going to have to work out his own problems,” Bentley had told Walt after scouring out the last of the trash cans. “I can’t. I’ve done what I could, but trying to pay this woman off is like pouring water through sand. It was a mistake that we ever took her on.”

  And of course Bentley was right. He’d been right yesterday. Walt had been the fool. What they’d done so far was the tip of the iceberg. There were worse things waiting. All morning long she’d been full of the Islands again—going back to Waikiki, maybe look up her old friend Velma Krane. Plane tickets were reasonable right now, during the fare war. You could fly round trip for about three hundred dollars. And who could say?—maybe once she was in Honolulu, by golly, she’d stay put. Maybe all she needed was a one-way ticket and first month’s rent on a little bungalow downtown. Fifteen hundred would about do it, give or take. As for the house in Orange, hell, she could lease that out and make an income.

  Walt hashed it over. What with Ivy’s commission, it was almost easier to give Mrs. Biggs what she wanted. Except that of course she wouldn’t go to Honolulu even so. She’d hang around Orange and weasel more money out of them until Walt cut her off. Then she’d rat all of them out to Jinx.

  Something had to be done right now. There was no more putting it off.

  Already he knew the answer. It had been circulating through his mind all morning long. Sending Vest back to North Carolina had been the work of an instant. He was probably counting his many blessings right now, along with his money, which he was spending on cheap Carolina real estate. Vest, after all, had wanted to go. Walt’s calling on the bluebird hadn’t been a matter of greed; it had been a matter of doing a man a favor, if you wanted to look at it that way.

  And if that was the way you were looking at it, then why not do the same favor for Maggie Biggs, who was pining away for the Islands? And there was Uncle Henry to think of too. Calling in the bluebird would be a blessing all the way around—everyone a winner. By golly, he’d kill two stones with one bird, he thought, laughing out loud, and he wished that he had someone to tell the joke to. Probably he’d never be able to tell it to anyone.

  He made the wish quickly, just a blink of his mind, and turned up Oak Street toward home.

  55

  MRS. SIMMS LIVED on Washington Street in a white clapboard house with a wraparound porch, and when Walt and the kids pulled up at the curb, she was sitting on the porch in a wooden chair, very still, watching the rain fall, her lawn all covered with leaves. She had a shawl around her shoulders and her hands in her lap, and from the way she stared at the street, it seemed clear to Walt that all the money in the world wouldn’t help her, not in the way she needed to be helped. She and Simms had been married for fifty years.

  “It’s her,” Eddie said, looking out the window.

  “She’s old,” Nora said. “She’s a million.”

  “Not that old,” Eddie said. “That’s stupid.”

  “Yes-huh,” Nora said. “Isn’t she a million, Unca Walter?”

  Somehow Nora had taken to calling him Walter, just like Jinx. Walt had always been a little irritated when Jinx called him that, but Nora somehow made it all right. Nora was the great leveler.

  “She’s close to a million,” Walt said. “Closer than we are, anyway.”

  “See?” Nora said to Eddie.

  “You don’t get it,” Eddie said.

  “Do too.”

  “Do not.”

  Walt held up the cashier’s check that he’d swapped the rest of the checks for. Argyle’s money had of course killed the fund-raiser. There didn’t seem to be any reason to go back out after another forty or fifty bucks or whatever they might have managed to scrounge up, and then they’d have to go to all the trouble to bake more cookies.

  “I’m going to let Nora carry the money,” he said, and he winked at Eddie.

  “That’s okay,” Eddie said. “I’ll stay here.”

  “Nope. We’ll all go,” Walt said. “You ready?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he ducked out into the rain, coming around the side of the car and opening the doors for the kids. Nora climbed out and took the check, then started out toward the porch, holding the check in front of her face with both hands as if she were hiding behind it.

  “Mrs. Simms, I believe,” Walt said, once they were out of the rain.

  She smiled and nodded, holding out her hand. Nora shook it like a pump handle. Eddie touched it, then pulled his hand away. Walt introduced the three of them, and Mrs. Simms said she was happy to meet them. Then Nora tried explaining the check, calling it a “fund raisin,” but Mrs. Simms was baffled. She took it and stared at it. “Whatever do you mean?” she asked.

  “It’s a collection from people in the neighborhood,” Walt explained. “It’s on behalf of Mr. Simms, because of the bell-ringing. People around here appreciated that. Nora and Eddie did the footwork. Every single person they talked to donated.” And that was true. There was no percentage in revealing that they’d only hit four houses before they’d quit.

  Suddenly Mrs. Simms was crying. She laid the check down on a little table next to the chair, then took her spectacles off and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief that she pulled out of her sleeve.

  “Why is she crying?” Nora whispered out loud.

  “Shhh,” Walt said.

  “It’s ‘cause of her husband,” Eddie said.

  Nora put her hand on Mrs. Simms’s arm, and Mrs. Simms patted Nora’s hand. She picked up the check again and looked at it. “Who would have thought?” she said to Walt.

  He shrugged. “Give people a chance,” he said, “and they’ll show their true colors.” Somehow he felt like a heel, and it dawned on him just then that he himself hadn’t contributed a dime to the check. He hadn’t thought to.

  “I’d like to know who donated,” she said. “I intend to write all of them a thank-you note.”

  “Well, there’s so many,” Walt said. “We didn’t keep any kind of record….”

  “There was that one lady on the corner,” Eddie said. “And the other one, too, that lived next door to her.”

  “That’s right,” Walt said. “We can get you their names and addresses anyway. That’s a start.”

  “Well, I’d be obliged,” she said.

  “And Mr. R-Guy,” Nora said. “He gave the most.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Walt said. “That’s true.”

  “Will you step inside?” Mrs. Simms asked. “I could put on a pot of coffee.”

  Walt nearly refused. He had things to do—boxes to pack for a last-ditch Christmas mailing, Christmas shopping, errands to run. He just didn’t have time….

  Then he realized what he was thinking. This was another case of there not being any room at the inn, wasn’t it? He couldn’t be
a good Samaritan; he was too busy. Someone else could do it. Charity was something you measured in dollars and cents, but you didn’t go to any trouble.

  “Would you like a cookie?” she asked Eddie.

  Eddie nodded, and Nora held onto her hand as they went into the house. Mr. Simms had apparently owned a doily factory, because there were doilies everywhere, as if the furniture were wearing special clothes. And there were easily a hundred dolls in the living room and dining room, big ones and little ones both, with porcelain heads and glass eyes. There was a big dollhouse on a table against a wall—a three-story Victorian with tiny shingles and intricate wooden fretwork and corbels and gables. The rooms had little hand-woven rugs on the floor and Chippendale furniture, and there were tiny milk cartons and canned goods in the kitchen. Nora stood staring at the house, rocking back and forth on her heels.

  “Here’s a cookie from the freezer,” Mrs. Simms said, coming out of the kitchen and pulling the top off a Tupperware container.

  Eddie took one.

  “You’d better have four, to start with,” she said, and Eddie took three more, then sat down on a chair and held the four cookies in his hand.

  “Oh!” Nora uttered, pointing at a doll with blonde curls.

  “Do you like that one?” Mrs. Simms asked.

  “Oh!” Nora said again. “She’s … Oh!”

  “Would you like to have her?”

  Nora swiveled around and looked at Walt, her eyes wide open in astonishment. “Could I?” she asked. Eddie sat in the chair staring straight ahead.

  “It would make me very happy,” Mrs. Simms said to Walt.

  He shrugged. “What do you say, Nora?”

  “Oh, yes!” Nora said.

  Mrs. Simms picked up the doll and handed it to Nora, who held it in her arms like a baby. “I have something for you, too,” Mrs. Simms said to Eddie. She led them into a den, where there was a line of books supported by two heavy brass bookends on a table. The bookends were square-rigged clipper ships tossing on ocean waves. “Do you like these?” Mrs. Simms asked.