She glanced down into the rear parking lot of the office building. The black pickup truck sat in a stall. “Where is Mr. Peetenpaul?” she asked. “He seems to have become unavailable.”
“Oh, he’s around. I can assure you of that. He’s a busy man, what with his plans. I think we can depend upon him for more business in the future.”
“Is he here now? In the building?”
“No,” Argyle said, his smile fixed on his face. “Here? Why do you ask?”
“Well, that seems to be his truck down there in the lot, doesn’t it?”
“Is it? Oh, of course it is. I’m having it … detailed for him. My man’s coming around this afternoon if the weather stays clear. Mobile detailing unit.”
“That’s big of you,” Ivy said, sitting down again. She saw that Argyle had his checkbook out. Apparently he was going to write out a great big check right then and there. She was reminded suddenly of Walt’s tearing up Mrs. Simms’s check in the garage the other night, and she could easily envision herself doing the same thing here, throwing the pieces in Argyle’s face. She realized that she was thinking of him as Argyle again. Robert had disappeared. “I saw Mr. Peetenpaul at the doughnut shop yesterday, at the All-Niter.”
He nodded, as if this fascinated him.
“He seemed to be on his way somewhere.”
“To eat a doughnut, probably.”
“Actually, he didn’t buy any doughnuts. He apparently abandoned his truck in the parking lot and drove away with a local woman, a Mrs. Biggs. It looked for all the world like they were carrying airline tickets.”
Argyle stared at her now, as if he didn’t quite take this in. “A Mrs. Biggs,” he said flatly.
“That’s what I was told. I wonder what exactly happened to his truck after that—the way he tossed his keys onto the floor and just walked away. I wonder, did he come back after it? Maybe I was wrong about the airline tickets?”
“Well, I don’t quite know,” Argyle said. “I’ve been a little busy myself. I see that I’m not up on the details of Mr. Peetenpaul’s life. Are you certain about this … this Mrs. Biggs? About the name, I mean? You saw the two of them leave together?” All the humor, even the false humor, had gone out of his face.
“I’m afraid I did. They seemed to be an item, actually. It almost looked as if they were taking off on their honeymoon, off to Tahiti or somewhere.”
Argyle looked away, thinking hard about something, his checkbook apparently forgotten for the moment. “I’ll be damned,” he said finally, then abruptly barked out a laugh. “Mr. Peet! That old son of a gun …”
“Look,” Ivy said, leaning forward. “Don’t bother with the check, all right? Let’s quit pretending. A little bit of honesty once in a while wouldn’t hurt much. I had hoped that after all these years things would have changed with you, but apparently they haven’t.”
“I’m afraid I don’t …” He shook his head helplessly.
“Walt was right, wasn’t he? He said that Mr. Peetenpaul was an employee of yours, and that this entire property transaction was set up to deceive me. I wanted to think differently, but it’s true, isn’t it? You’ve had something up your sleeve all along. You’ve been playing some sort of game, saying one thing, doing another. This has all been a deception.”
He looked steadily at her for a moment, as if he were scrambling to find something to say in his own defense. “We had a contract,” he said, just a little desperately, “and I intend to honor it. Humor me, Ivy, for old times’ sake. Give me another chance.” He picked up a pen and reached for the checkbook. “This is no deception, I assure you.”
“I’ll tear it up, Robert. I mean it. I don’t want your money. As for another chance, I don’t quite know what you mean by that, and I don’t think I want to.”
“This commission could make you, Ivy. It could open doors for you. I’ve got powerful friends, wealthy friends. They buy and sell property for sums of money that would astonish you. And certainly this commission, as small as it is, would very nearly save Walt, wouldn’t it? You were telling me about his business. Hanging on through the first year is crucial. This money could make Walt’s dreams come true—get him out of the garage and into a commercial building, who knows where he’d end up?”
“Nobody knows,” Ivy said. “What I know is that you don’t understand the first thing about Walt, and you never have. He wouldn’t touch your money twenty years ago, and he won’t touch it now. Neither would I. Don’t make me say any more about it. Please. And don’t pretend to have Walt’s best interests in mind, because you don’t, and you know it. This whole thing was a mistake. Let’s end it here.”
He shrugged and slumped back into his seat. After a moment he closed the checkbook slowly, but left it on the desktop. “I did it for you,” he said. “What does it matter who bought the property?”
“What matters is that nobody bought the property. You were trying to buy me. That’s closer to the truth, isn’t it?”
“Don’t say that. I wouldn’t do that. I can’t explain what I mean, exactly, but believe me when I tell you that I’m undergoing changes in my life. Profound changes. I don’t know what you’d call them—spiritual changes, I guess. I’ve finally managed to square things away. There’s a … a spiritual bankruptcy, I guess you could say, that a man can apply for when he’s in the sort of debt I’m in. I mean to say that I’ve filed Chapter 13, Ivy. I’m getting out from under a great … a great debt, a great weight. I’ll be free of it. By tomorrow I’ll … I’ll finally be able to feel good about myself.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Robert. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think you do either. I think you’re the most incredibly self-deceived human being I’ve ever known. I’d bet a shiny new dime that by tomorrow you won’t have changed in any way at all, although you probably will feel good about yourself, heaven help you. So please don’t mention your commission again, or whatever you want to call it. Save your breath.”
He gestured at her, holding up both hands, then slid them under the edge of the heavy checkbook and tilted it at her, letting her see his name embossed in gold on the leather cover. “You’ve got to understand what this would mean …”
“I’m really tired of this,” she said, interrupting him again. She stood up and leaned on the desk, looking down on him now. “I’m going to say one last thing, and while I say it I don’t want you to speak. I know that something’s gone on over the past few weeks between you and Walt. I don’t know what it is. I thought it was him making it up, out of jealousy or something, but I don’t think so any more. So listen to this: if you so much as touch that man, if you come near our house, if you do anything to damage him or his business or anything else, I swear to God I’ll find a way to hurt you.”
She laid the manila envelope on the desktop, then walked out the door.
65
WALT FITTED CANDLE bulbs into the Dilworth catalogue golden lampstand, then carried it out to the tin shed and set it in among the pine trees. He stepped back to take a look at the thing, breathing the scent of the pine and listening to the rain on the roof. The lampstand reminded him suddenly of the lamppost in Narnia; there was something magically incongruous about it, even if it was made out of pot metal and plaster of Paris.
It occurred to him that he was rationalizing having spent good money on what was evidently a piece of junk, and he turned around and went back out into the rain, heading for the garage.
That was tough about Ivy’s losing Argyle’s big commission. At first Walt had tried to talk her into taking it anyway, the whole sixty grand, just like she’d made him take the check for Mrs. Simms. Why not?—cash the check and then tell Argyle to his face what kind of a stinking geek he really was. Take his money and insult him both, so as to double the satisfaction. Of course, that wasn’t the sort of thing Ivy would do, and he was proud of her for that. The only trouble was that he had pretty much convinced himself that spending forty bucks on this crap from the catalogu
e was no big deal, since they were suddenly rolling in money anyway. Now it looked like a big deal again, because suddenly they weren’t rolling in money at all; they weren’t rolling in anything but visiting relatives. It was going to be a drier Christmas than he’d thought. And by spring, if things didn’t pick up considerably, he was going to be reading the want ads in the morning instead of the comics.
In the garage he shifted boxes out of the way and uncovered an old chair that Ivy was making him store out there. She’d bought it at a garage sale—too good a deal to pass by—but then they hadn’t had any room for it, so it had gone into storage. He pounded on the worn tapestry seat a couple of times to knock the dust out of it, then picked it up by its wooden arms and carried it around to the shed, setting it down inside the door so that the pine boughs nearly brushed against it. Now all he needed was some kind of little table to set a drink and a book on, and the shed would be about perfect.
He wondered idly how he could hide the lamp cord, which right now snaked across the floor, ruining the effect. Maybe straight up through the roof. Or maybe a hole in the indoor-outdoor carpeting and then through the floor itself, run it into the garage through plastic conduit instead of using an extension cord.
He glanced out through the open door, at the concrete stepping-stones in the lawn. There was a patch of blackened grass around the stone that hid the bluebird, and some kind of greenish-looking puffball toadstools coming up through it, as if the ground had been poisoned. He thought about the mutated salmon eggs in the tackle box and Bentley’s talk about demons.
Probably it was time to get the jar out of there, he thought idly, off the property altogether. How easy would that be? Was he tough enough? It was easy to refuse the demon when you had other options, but when the ice was getting thin, and your dreams were one by one falling through …
It was true that he had made a hideous error when he set the bird on Sidney Vest. Lord knows there was plenty of evidence that the thing meant trouble. It had given him tomatoes but killed his herbs. It had delivered his newspaper early and then sabotaged his mail. It had given him sixty bucks in the Lotto and then smashed up his car. He had asked it to send Sidney Vest home to Raleigh, and by golly the bird had done it. Thank God he had gotten to it before it killed Maggie Biggs, too.
And what exactly had happened there? The bird had apparently come through in fine style, and the result of that whole deal was that Ivy’s money went down the rat hole. There seemed to be some kind of awful cost that went along with making a wish on the bluebird—an equal and opposite reaction that was utterly unpredictable and vicious.
He sat down in the chair and stared into the trees. Of course, he had no way of knowing that any of this was true. The herb garden, the mail, the bent fender, even Vest’s death—all of that might easily be coincidence, and not even unlikely coincidence, either. The Maggie Biggs wish had certainly been successful, unless of course it had cost them the sixty grand.
Maybe there was a way to phrase things, he thought. He had gone about the first wishes haphazardly, like an amateur. It wasn’t until he’d saved Maggie Biggs that he’d considered how to talk to the bird. Perhaps it was simply necessary to phrase the request carefully….
Just then there was a loud metallic knocking, and he nearly leaped out of the chair at the sound of it. Robert Argyle stood in the doorway under a black umbrella, the rain dripping down around him. Walt blinked at him for a moment, as if Argyle were a hallucination. Someone had apparently given him a fat lip. Well, good for them, whoever it was.
“Top of the morning to you,” Walt said, recovering. “What brings you out into the rain?”
“Can I step inside?”
Walt gestured, inviting him in, and Argyle closed up his umbrella and shook the rain off. “I want you to know there are no hard feelings,” he said.
“About what, exactly?”
“Forgive me for saying so, but you seem to have taken all this too personally, Walt. You shouldn’t let morons like Lorimer Bentley feed you full of ideas. You’ve always been your own man. Keep it up. The Bentleys of the world can’t see past their noses, but men like us have vision.”
“‘Men like us,’” Walt said flatly. “Why am I troubled by that phrase?”
“There’s no need to apologize,” Argyle told him.
“Apologize? That’s a relief. You don’t know how good that makes me feel.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
“That’s why you dropped by, to tell me I don’t have to apologize? Or do you have something else in mind?”
“Well, in fact I do—two things. First I want you to know that the Robert Argyle you’ve known for the last twenty years will shortly cease to exist, in a manner of speaking.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Walt said.
“I guess you could say that I’ll be the phoenix that rises from the ashes. It’s a long story, Walt. By now Bentley’s told you most of it, so there’s no need to pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about. I guess … I guess I want to make amends, you might say. I want you to know that I forgive you for coveting the bluebird, which you have to admit was rightfully mine. I’m sorry that I had to resort to … to the methods I had to resort to in order to retrieve it, but honestly, I gave you every opportunity.”
“Yes, you did. No hard feelings.”
“Good. One more thing. As you know, Ivy and I have had what you might call a special relationship, and …”
“Don’t push your luck,” Walt said.
“Pardon me?”
“You haven’t had any sort of relationship at all with Ivy except in your pitiful imagination. If you say another word about her … Look, just do yourself a favor and shut the hell up.”
Argyle stared at him. “I certainly didn’t mean …”
“Then what did you mean? Say what you mean and get the hell out of here.”
“I owe her a considerable sum of money, which she refuses to take for reasons that I don’t at all understand. I happen to be very interested in absolving myself of debt right now; I guess that’s the best way to put it. And I came here hoping that you and I might come to an understanding between ourselves.”
“Let me get this straight. You figure that Ivy has too many scruples to take your dirty money, but that I don’t have those scruples. You ‘understand’ me, is that it? Is that how you’d put it?”
“I didn’t say that. I just think that as a businessman you understand …”
“Do you have the check?”
Argyle nodded. “In my pocket.”
“Then you’re right, I’ll take it,” Walt said.
Argyle took a check out of his coat pocket and handed it to Walt, who looked at the sum. It was written out for an even sixty thousand. Walt crumpled it into a ball and threw them out into the rain. “Now take a hike,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to say to you, except that you ought to do yourself a favor and open your damned eyes. You don’t look like any kind of phoenix to me; you look like a man who’s lost his mind. I seem to recall that you used to have one.”
He bent over and picked up the plug end of the lamp cord, connecting it to the extension cord running out of the garage. The candle bulbs in the golden lampstand flickered on, seeming to waver like candle flames. For one eerie moment the darkness in the shed actually deepened, as if night had fallen. The bulbs shone like fireflies and the black shadows of the trees stood out against the shed walls like etchings. Then the glow from the bulbs spread—not as if the bulbs were gaining in wattage, but as if the light emanating from them was actually moving very slowly, billowing into a cloud like the smoke rising out of a genie’s lamp.
Walt glanced up at Argyle, who stood staring, his eyes wide. His face seemed fleshless in the light of the lamp-stand, a grinning skull. His teeth were brown, like old ivory, and he raised his hands slowly, turning them over and looking at his palms in apparent disbelief, as if he could see his bones through his flesh. A noise came out of his mouth, a groa
n like the creaking of a door, and he turned on his heel and staggered out onto the lawn, where he bent over and picked up the balled-up check, putting it into his pocket without looking at it. He stood staring up into the avocado tree, his hands crossed on his chest like a man laid out for burial.
“What’s wrong?” Walt asked him, getting up out of his chair. It looked as if the bastard was having a heart attack. “You all right?”
But Argyle waved him away and lurched off in the direction of the gate, past the family room window, where Nora and Eddie sat watching the television. Argyle looked in at the children, and Walt heard him utter another groan. Then he staggered forward again, almost falling, and Walt followed, swinging open the gate to let him out. Hunched over, Argyle went away down the driveway, hurrying now, as if he were pursued by something. His car was parked at the curb. Walt watched him climb into it and drive away. Strangely, there was a passenger in the car. Someone had been waiting for him.
66
“WAS THAT MR. R-Guy?”
“Yeah,” Walt said, turning around. Nora had come outside. Eddie stood in the doorway.
“He was all bent,” Nora said.
“Yes, he was,” Walt told her. “That’s just what he was. He’s one of the bent people. Come on over here, out of the rain.”
“Eddie drew Mr. Binion,” Nora said.
“What?” Walt looked at her, baffled. “Mr. Binion?” Eddie stepped down onto the walk and hurried across to the carport to join them, holding out a piece of paper with a crayon drawing of a snail on it. The snail was apparently wearing a hat.
“Mr. Binion,” Nora said. “The snail.” She waved at the lawn. “You know. Don’t be funny.”
“Oh, that Mr. Binion. Of course.” He looked at the picture. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “That’s a good likeness.” Eddie was very nearly smiling. “I’d like to have this,” Walt said. Eddie nodded.
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