8
WALT RECOGNIZED THE man coming toward him. Hell. It wasn’t the burglar at all; it was worse—a minister, the Reverend Bentley from the storefront church down on Grand Street who had the irritating habit of making door-to-door forays through the neighborhoods, looking for converts, passing out little tracts.
Walt turned around to avoid him, but it was too late. He’d been seen, recognized. Bentley hurried forward, as if he had something urgent to say. He looked rumpled and beat, and his wet jacket was streaked with dirt. The rain let up just then, and for a moment the sun showed through a gap in the clouds. The minister looked up at the clouds and smiled, as if he’d put in a request and God had seen fit to grant it.
“Henry and Jinx on the horizon, then?” Bentley asked, shaking Walt’s hand.
Walt nodded. The Reverend Bentley was an old friend of Henry’s; they went way back—lodge brothers of some sort. Walt hardly knew Bentley, though, and he was slightly surprised that the man recognized him so easily, looking half drowned and hiding behind the umbrella. “They’re due any moment, actually. They were in Needles last night, and were thinking about taking a detour through apple country, but I expect them any time.”
“Good,” the minister said, looking around. “That’s good. I’m going to drag that old sinner in front of the congregation and flush out his soul with a firehose.”
“It’s high time,” Walt said. “What brings you out on a day like this?”
“Trouble in paradise,” Bentley said. “How’s your soul, by the way? You look like a worried man, like maybe you swallowed some kind of sin.”
The question took Walt by surprise. The minister could be a hell of an irritating old interloper when he was on a mission in the neighborhood. He was something of a local joke, in fact, and his church had a congregation you could put into the back of a pickup truck and still have room for the dog. He did good works, though, taking food around to shut-ins and the like. Lord knows how he continued to fund his projects. He had a sort of meals-on-wheels van that Uncle Henry had driven for a few weeks last winter, dropping off hot lunches at the houses of neighborhood widows. Aunt Jinx had put an end to it, though, after talking to one of the widows among the vegetable bins at Satellite Market. Walt himself had donated a hundred bucks to the meals program in a generous moment. That was a few years ago, when money had been a little easier to come by.
“I guess it’s still hobbling along,” Walt said.
“What is?” The minister was looking vaguely off down the street, not paying attention.
“My soul. You asked how my soul was doing.”
“Well … good. Keep at it, then. This is Babylon we’re living in, make no mistake about that. There’s a lot of temptations out there.” He looked meaningfully at Walt now, as if this tidbit of information had been hand-selected.
“That’s the truth,” Walt said.
“I can tell you that a lot of people fall,” Bentley said.
“Like ripe fruit.” Walt shook his head at the seriousness of it.
“Don’t be cocky.” The minister narrowed his eyes, convinced that Walt was making fun of him. “Pride goeth, as they say. Here—here’s a little something to read.”
He handed Walt a pamphlet, maybe three inches square, with a picture of a lion and a lamb on the front, lying down together with such wide, dopey grins on their faces that it looked as if they’d just been hit over the head with a mallet. The title of the booklet was “Marriage as an Obstacle to Sin.”
Bentley took Walt’s elbow suddenly and steered him toward the corner, pointing across the street, toward St. Anthony’s. “What’s going on there? My vision’s not …”
Without waiting for an answer he let go of Walt’s arm and hurried forward. Walt followed him, noticing now that there was a police car in the parking lot. Half a dozen people milled around near the base of the bell tower. It looked like the top of the tower had collapsed. At least one of the bells had fallen, and the bronze edge of it, shiny with rainwater, was shoved out of a gaping hole in the stucco tower. That was the noise he’d heard twenty minutes ago.
Bentley slogged through the water in the gutter, waiting for a gap in the traffic before sprinting across, two steps ahead of Walt. There was the sound of a siren from up the boulevard, and in moments an ambulance pulled up, slamming to a halt, its siren cutting off. The crowd parted, and for a moment Walt got a good look at the man who lay on the concrete floor at the base of the tower. Clearly the heavy bell had gone right through the upper floor, smashing the bellringer on the head and knocking him down the steep wooden stairs. The side of his head was crushed, and his mouth hung open unnaturally….
A couple of kids came around the side of the church, and a woman in the crowd turned and corralled them with her arms. “Stay back,” someone else hollered. “One of the bells came down. It’s still …”
Walt didn’t hear the rest of it. He turned away, walking back toward the street. The shadow on the roof early this morning—someone had been up there. Someone evidently had sabotaged the bell. Why the hell hadn’t he called the police? Now the bellringer was dead.
Without thinking he stepped down into the gutter, heard a horn honk, and jumped back up onto the curb as a car whizzed by, the driver shouting something at him and flipping him off out the window, over the top of the car.
Walt waved. The picture of the dead man—surely he was dead—remained in his mind as he waited to recross the street: in his mind he saw the bell tower, the stairs leading away into the shadows above, a shoe lying on the second step, the bottom step smeared with blood, a woman’s face mesmerized with the horror of it, her hand to her mouth as if to stop herself from screaming….
Walt shuddered. He wanted desperately to go home, to change out of his wet clothes and warm up. It was raining again, but he didn’t raise the umbrella. He walked a few steps farther, standing in the shelter of a big cypress tree and shielding his eyes from the water dripping through the branches. The two ambulance drivers stepped toward the back of the ambulance, carrying the body on a blanket-covered gurney. Presently the ambulance pulled out into traffic, switching on its siren and accelerating toward the west, probably heading for the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. Walt wondered if there was anything hopeful in the sound of the siren. Would they bother with it if the bellringer was dead? Would they cover the man’s face if he wasn’t?
He realized he was still carrying the tract that Bentley had given him, and suddenly the little folded bit of paper enraged him—a trivial little scrap of holier-than-thou advice in a world where someone had just been crushed to death in a blind instant. And at such a moment! Did the bellringer have a wife, a family? Did his wife consider marriage an obstacle to sin, or something considerably more than that?
Bentley was nowhere to be seen now; otherwise Walt would have thrown the tract in his face. He shoved it into his pocket instead, and then walked toward where two policemen stood talking, up under the roof of the portico at the front of the church.
And even as he stepped toward them he told himself that he could just as easily not say anything at all. It was too damned late now anyway. Speaking up now was nothing but useless humiliation, self-revenge….
But he forced himself forward, refusing to listen. One of the policemen turned and nodded at him, and Walt introduced himself, clearing his throat but still unable to get the gravel out of his voice, suddenly wishing to heaven that Ivy was there with him, holding his hand, that he wasn’t standing there wet and alone and empty on this bleak December morning.