All The Bells on Earth by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

joke, predictably having to do with socks. She and Walt had carefully avoided him over the past couple of years that they’d been neighbors. When it had been absolutely necessary, a nod or a monosyllable had been enough. Three years ago he had run for school board, and Ivy had to stop Walt from driving around the neighborhoods and vandalizing his campaign signs.
    But, God, his face had gotten coarse over the years. He looked almost grainy, and his eyes were too active, as if he were afraid of something. Gravity hadn’t been kind to him, and he was getting a little jowly. He was tall—taller than Walt, who was nearly six-two—and had always walked with just a slight stoop, as if he’d been timid and withdrawn as a child. His hair was still just as brown as it had been when they had dated in college. Walt’s was gray at the temples, but Argyle looked older than Walt despite that.
    He put his coffee cup on the next table, which was cluttered with dirty dishes, and then asked, “Can I join you?”
    She thought immediately of Walt’s stock rejoinder: “What’s the matter, do I look like I’m coming apart?” and she nearly giggled out loud, realizing at the same time that she was nervous. There was too much history between them for it to be any other way. Sometimes things broke and you couldn’t fix them. It was better to throw them away.
    “Only for a moment,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m meeting a client.”
    “Good. That’s nothing to be afraid of. In this economy, any business is good business.”
    He looked searchingly at her, as if he were trying to see if there was anything in her face that he could read, some evidence that she still carried a torch for him, perhaps a candle, a lighted match…. Whatever kind of man he had been twenty years ago, he was made of something different now. The years had turned him upside down and shaken all the good things out of his pockets, unless you counted money as a good thing, and in his case it wasn’t. Aunt Jinx had called him a “husk” once, when Walt was going on about him, which was the word Jinx used for worthless, empty men. Ivy wondered now if that was fair. The evidence was twenty years old. Maybe there was a statute of limitations on that kind of thing.
    Argyle remained standing as he talked, and she realized that she’d tuned him out. “… a couple of industrial properties over on Batavia, if you’re interested,” he said.
    She nodded. What was this, a business proposition? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw my client coming in. What were you saying?”
    He looked at her for a moment before speaking. “I was wondering whether you were interested in listing a couple of pieces of property.”
    The idea struck her as odd. The last time she had spoken to him he’d—what?—propositioned her; there was nothing else to call it. She’d put him off pretty hard. Of course she hadn’t told Walt, who would simply have gone out of his mind. So the suggestion that they have dealings of any sort, even business dealings, was a complete surprise. Her first impulse was to turn him down.
    But if there was ever a time that she and Walt needed the income from commissions, it was now. Why not take the man’s money? Walt was determined to make his business work, and he deserved to. Probably he
would
make it work, given enough time, because as screwball as some of his ideas could be, he had a certain strange genius for seeing the sense in nonsense, and making other people see it too. Not that catalogue sales was nonsense—Argyle apparently had done all right with his own mail-order businesses over the years….
    “Perhaps I could drop by the office,” she said to him. Breakfast or lunch was out of the question.
    “Tomorrow, then?”
    “Make it day after tomorrow, can you? I’m going over to my sister’s tomorrow.”
    “That’s fine,” he said. “Morning? Say ten?”
    “Ten’s fine.” She wondered why she’d mentioned her sister. Her