All The Bells on Earth (35 page)

“That costed a million dollars,” Nora said.

“And they bought it with money from a fund drive?” Walt handed the catalogue back to her and started the car.

“At the Easter one they bought a computer,” Eddie said.

“Good for them.” Walt headed up Chapman Avenue, wondering what Ivy would say about this, whether she’d find it as contemptible as he did. “What are you supposed to do, go around the neighborhood selling this stuff?”

“And on the telephone,” Eddie said. “They have a list of what people we can call, like our dentist and our grandma. If we can sell ten things we get a prize. Ten things is a hundred dollars.”

“One of the prizes is a giant bubble thing,” Nora said. “You can make these big big bubbles with it.” She held her hands out, indicating a bubble four feet across. “It’s a string on a stick.”

“Really?” Walt said. “You earn a hundred dollars and they give you a string on a stick?”

“And soap,” Eddie said. “And this kind of plate thing you put the soap in.”

“A kind of plate thing …” Walt said. He nearly turned the Suburban around and headed back to the preschool. This was unbelievable, like something out of Charles Dickens—a hundred small children peddling Argyle’s pine-cone wreaths door to door in the rain, patriotically hustling funds so that the dirty bastard didn’t have to spend his own money on a million-dollar fiberglass dinosaur. This was capitalism gone rancid—inbred money-mongering. Maybe the commies had been right after all. What had Ivy told him?—that Argyle owned something like seven preschools? So that was seven hundred kids at a hundred dollars a head! And how many times a year?

“Can you take us around, Unca Walter?” Nora asked him.

“Yeah,” Walt said. “I guess I can. Except I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t I buy all of it myself? Then you don’t have to sell anything.”

“Really?” Eddie asked.
“All of it?”

“Sure,” Walt said. “I’ll take the whole pile.” Tomorrow he could take the catalogues back down to the school and make Argyle eat them.

“But I wanted to do a fund raisin,” Nora said.

“You
can
do a fund raisin,” Walt said. “A better one. This one will help someone who really needs help bad right now. What do you think? Are you in?”

“Who needs help?” Eddie asked.

“This woman named Mrs. Simms. Her husband, old Mr. Simms, just died. He used to ring the bells at the church, but he died, and Mrs. Simms was left all alone.”

“Then she’s a widow,” Eddie said. “A widow woman.”

“That’s right. We’ve got to help her out. What we’ll sell is … cookies. People give you as much funds as they want, and they get two dozen cowboy cookies wrapped up in Christmas foil.”

“But I want a bubble wand,” Nora said. “I don’t want cowboys.”

“Cowboy
cookies
,” Walt said. “With raisins. That’s what
they
get, the people who fork over money.”

“Fund raisin cookies!” Eddie said.

“Right!” Walt shouted happily. “Eddie, you’re a genius. We’ll make Mrs. Simms happy after all.”

“But what’s our prize?” Nora asked sadly. “We were going to have a prize.”

“You get a bubble wand for sure.”

“No matter what?” Eddie asked.

“No matter what,” Walt said, pulling into the driveway and cutting the engine. “And for every ten dollars you earn you get another prize. Let’s see. If you make a thousand dollars that’s … a hundred prizes!”

“I’m going to start right now!” Eddie said, climbing out.

“You’ll need a brochure,” Walt said. “We’ll run that up on the computer. And you’ll need a pencil, too, and an affidavit of authenticity. I’ll sign that. And order forms. Here, we’ll use the order forms you got from school. They won’t mind.”

He tore the forms out of the back of Argyle’s Christmas catalogues, then tossed the notebooks into the rear of the Suburban. Later he could come out and soak them in the gutter for a half hour, then throw them onto the roof of the house to dry.

“T
HAT’S THE TICKET,”
M
AGGIE
Biggs said. “A bluebird in a jar full of some kind of liquid—I don’t know what kind. And what difference does that make anyway? Apparently there’s only this one bird. You don’t have to pick and choose.”

They stood in the alley behind the library. The high brick wall sheltered them from the rain, which angled in from the west, and out on the street the cars had their wipers on. Rainwater trickled out of a metal downspout. Henry stared at the bumper of a car parked in the library lot. “Practice safe government,” the sticker read, “use kingdoms.”

“I’m telling you this bird’s been thrown away.” Henry forced himself to concentrate on what she was telling him. His mind was tired, and he wished to hell he was back in the motor home, taking a nap.

“What do you mean, ‘thrown away’?”

“He threw it into the bin yesterday afternoon.”

“Don’t lie to me, you old fool. Why would he throw it away when there’s people willing to pay for it?”

“Because it’s an evil damned thing in a jar,” Henry said, suddenly angered that he’d been called down here in the rain, and after she’d promised not to call the house at all. Thank God Jinx had been out! “I took one look at this bird and I
told
him to throw it away, and by golly he did the right thing.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You’d better dig it out of the bin lickety-split.”

“Don’t bully me,” he said, taking a stand.

“I’ll do worse than that, and you know it.”

“You might as well save your breath. I suppose the bird’s gone by now anyway.”

“
Gone!
How would you know? Did you look?”

“Well, no. It’s just that …”

“It’s just that you’ll have to look now, that’s what it is. And quit being such a bag of pudding. For God’s sake, Henry, give your infernal conscience a rest. If he threw it in the bin, then it’s trash now, isn’t it? There’s no crime in taking it back out. And your precious nephew
stole
it from my party in the first place.”

“Walter wouldn’t do that.”

“Did he tell you how he got it?”

“Why, in a shipment, from China. He imports …”

“I
know
what he imports. What I’m asking is did he
order
this bird in a jar?”

“He apparently found it in this shipment. There was just the one, and …”

“And hold your tongue for a second. It was delivered to his house
by mistake
, and you know it’s true, don’t you?”

This was the same thing Bentley had told him! It
had
all been a mistake. Maggie Biggs was right about that much: it hadn’t been Walt’s to throw away, and that’s why he’d been so damned guilty about it. Well, that part was too bad, and he himself had aided and abetted the whole thing. He had nearly
forced
Walt to do it. “I guess it was my fault,” he said.

“Well, I don’t doubt it. But if that’s true, then it’s up to you to make it right,” she told him. “You hand it over to me and I’ll return it to its rightful owner. If you want a signed affidavit, I’ll give you one.”

“I don’t guess …”

“And let me tell you something else. This party I represent
wants this object
, and he wants it now. I can’t be blamed for what he might do if he finds out it’s been destroyed. I
like
your nephew. He’s treated me pretty well. He buggered up my stove, but I don’t hold that against him.”

“What do you mean?” Henry asked. “What will this man do?”

“For goodness sake,
I
don’t know.
I
can’t be expected to think like a murderer, can I? That’s not my province.”

“Murder!” Henry gasped.

Mrs. Biggs shrugged. “You didn’t hear it from me. I’m not saying anything. Look, let’s just say your nephew climbed in over his head. This is the big leagues he’s playing in, and the poor fool thinks he’s out on the sandlot with the kids. Now if someone were to put through a call to your wife, say, and tell her about us …”

“
Us!
This is rubbish. Extortion, that’s what Bentley called it.”

She snorted out a laugh. “Bentley!” she said. “I guess the Reverend’s familiar with the likes of
that
. I won’t dispute with the Reverend when it comes to the subject of pernicious activity. But I won’t be threatened by the man, either. He comes into my home and breaks things up, vandalizes the place …” She shook her head. “So you watch your words. You wave the Reverend at me and by God I’ll run the whole lot of you into the sheriff.”

“What I meant to say is that you were going to leave Jinx out of this. That was our agreement.”

“Oh,
I’m
willing to leave her out. She’s got enough grief, I suppose. What I was saying is that to this party who’s been cheated out of his bluebird, a phone call to your wife would be a warm-up. He’d
start
with that.”

“You’ve simply
got
to call him off.”

“Only one thing that’ll call him off, Henry, and that’s this bird.”

There was the sound of a trash truck then, Orange Disposal Company making its twice-weekly rounds of commercial bins. Mrs. Biggs cocked her head, listening. “Sounds like they’re out behind the bank, don’t it?” She clucked her tongue, as if it were a dirty shame. “A couple of minutes and they’ll be scooping that bird, won’t they?”

They
were
behind the bank. Henry watched the bin rising in the air, upending into the open mouth of the truck. Without saying another word he turned around and started across the library parking lot toward Coco’s. If he cut through a couple of lots and up the alley, he could make it to the bins at the medical center ahead of the truck. There was too much at risk to hesitate now.

“Bring it over to the All-Niter,” Mrs. Biggs shouted at him.

He waved in agreement and then put up his umbrella. Shaffer Street was running ankle-deep in water, and he was forced to slog through it. The rain fell harder, pounding down now, beating through the pine trees that shaded the restaurant. He heard the trash truck again, and looked back just as the thing rounded the corner, pulling in behind Coco’s kitchen. Henry stepped up his pace, racing with the truck now, angling his umbrella back into the wind, letting it shove him along. He had gotten Walt into terribly deep water, carrying on about damnation like that, nearly
forcing
him to throw the damned jar away. “You’ll ride to the Devil in comfort,” he had told Walt, and now by God he had apparently delivered his poor nephew straight into the Devil’s hands! Good intentions! Bentley was right; sometimes they weren’t worth a handful of chicken scratch.

The brick enclosure around the trash bins loomed up ahead of him in the rain. The truck was nearly two blocks behind now. He had plenty of time. He would save Walt yet.

He rooted through the trash, yanking aside empty cartons and stuffed plastic sacks. Immediately he saw the salmon eggs that had gone bad, wrapped up in wet newspaper like a party popper. The bin was about half full, nearly the same as it had been yesterday. It was too deep, though, for him to reach to the bottom of it. He looked around the alley, spotting a couple of cinderblocks against the wall of the medical building, and he hurried across and dragged them over to the bin, one for each foot.

He was
sure
that Walt had stuffed the bird under a sack of trash at the left-hand corner, but by golly it wasn’t there now. He yanked a sack out, dropping it onto the wet concrete, then heaved out three cardboard boxes and another sack. The damned thing was simply gone! There was the noise of the truck gearing up again, and he looked up the alley. The truck was bearing down on him. He pitched his umbrella into the hedge behind him and rooted around with both hands, through wet computer paper and old magazines and coffee grounds. Nothing. It simply wasn’t there.

Puzzled, he stepped down off the blocks, realizing the truth. The bird was gone. Someone had taken it. The trash truck heaved to a stop, and a man stepped down off the running board and said something to him in Spanish, gesturing at the boxes and bags on the ground. Henry shook his head, having no idea what the man had said.

The man shrugged and started picking up the boxes on the ground, chucking them back into the bin. Henry bent over to help, but the man waved him away. “Is okay,” he said. “No problema.”

“No problema,” Henry said to him, stepping back a couple of feet and watching for a moment, as if that were his duty. The man waved the truck forward, and Henry fetched his umbrella out of the hedge and headed up the street toward home, mulling the entire situation over in his mind.

So who had taken the jar out of the bin? A stranger? That didn’t wash. The bird wasn’t the kind of thing anybody would want.

It had to have been Walt.

Walt coveted the thing. He was under its spell. That had been evident yesterday, when he was going on about it, talking about bags full of money, trying to rationalize keeping the damned thing. This was what Bentley had tried to warn them about, and now the truth was crystal clear: Henry hadn’t done
enough
to talk Walt out of it.

Maybe the best thing he could do now was to steal it back and give it to Maggie Biggs just like she said—let her murdering friends go to the Devil instead of poor Walter. Dollars to doughnuts it was back in the tackle box in the rafters—easy enough to take it back out again.