Hearts In Atlantis (18 page)

In the end, George Sanders was also the one who got rid of them. He had discovered he could keep the Children from reading his mind—for a little while, anyway—if he imagined a brick wall in his head, with all his most secret thoughts behind it. And after everyone had decided the Children must go (you could teach them math, but not why it was bad to punish someone by making him drive over a cliff), Sanders put a time-bomb into his briefcase and took it into the schoolroom. That was the only place where the Children—Bobby understood in some vague way that they were only supernatural versions of Jack
Merridew and his hunters in
Lord of the Flies
—were all together.

They sensed that Sanders was hiding something from them. In the movie's final excruciating sequence, you could see bricks flying out of the wall Sanders had constructed in his head, flying faster and faster as the Children of the Damned pried into him, trying to find out what he was concealing. At last they uncovered the image of the bomb in the briefcase—eight or nine sticks of dynamite wired up to an alarm clock. You saw their creepy golden eyes widen with understanding, but they didn't have time to do anything. The bomb exploded. Bobby was shocked that the hero died—Randolph Scott never died in the Saturday-matinee movies at the Empire, neither did Audie Murphy or Richard Carlson—but he understood that George Sanders had given his life For the Greater Good of All. He thought he understood something else, as well: Ted's blank-outs.

While Ted and Bobby had been visiting Midwich, the day in southern Connecticut had turned hot and glaring. Bobby didn't like the world much after a really good movie in any case; for a little while it felt like an unfair joke, full of people with dull eyes, small plans, and facial blemishes. He sometimes thought if the world had a
plot
it would be so much better.

“Brautigan and Garfield hit the bricks!” Ted exclaimed as they stepped from beneath the marquee (a banner reading
COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE
hung from the marquee's front). “What did you think? Did you enjoy it?”

“It was great,” Bobby said. “Fantabulous. Thanks for taking me. It was practically the best movie I ever
saw. How about when he had the dynamite? Did you think he'd be able to fool them?”

“Well . . . I'd read the book, remember. Will
you
read it, do you think?”

“Yes!” Bobby felt, in fact, a sudden urge to bolt back to Harwich, running the whole distance down the Connecticut Pike and Asher Avenue in the hot sunshine so he could borrow
The Midwich Cuckoos
with his new adult library card at once. “Did he write any other science-fiction stories?”

“John Wyndham? Oh yes, quite a few. And will no doubt write more. One nice thing about science-fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely dither five years between books. That is the prerogative of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.”

“Are the others as good as the one we just saw?”

“
The Day of the Triffids
is as good.
The Kraken Wakes
is even better.”

“What's a kraken?”

They had reached a streetcorner and were waiting for the light to change. Ted made a spooky, big-eyed face and bent down toward Bobby with his hands on his knees. “It's a
monstah
,” he said, doing a pretty good Boris Karloff imitation.

They walked on, talking first about the movie and then about whether or not there really might be life in outer space, and then on to the special cool ties George Sanders had worn in the movie (Ted told him that kind of tie was called an ascot). When Bobby next took notice of their surroundings they had come to a part of Bridgeport he had never been in before—when he came to the city with his mom, they stuck to downtown, where the big stores were. The stores here were
small and crammed together. None sold what the big department stores did: clothes and appliances and shoes and toys. Bobby saw signs for locksmiths, check-cashing services, used books.
ROD'S GUNS
, read one sign.
WO FAT NOODLE CO.
, read another.
FOTO FINISHING
, read a third. Next to
WO FAT
was a shop selling
SPECIAL SOUVENIRS.
There was something weirdly like the Savin Rock midway about this street, so much so that Bobby almost expected to see the Monte Man standing on a streetcorner with his makeshift table and his lobsterback playing cards.

Bobby tried to peer through the
SPECIAL SOUVENIRS
window when they passed, but it was covered by a big bamboo blind. He'd never heard of a store covering their show window during business hours. “Who'd want a special souvenir of Bridgeport, do you think?”

“Well, I don't think they really sell souvenirs,” Ted said. “I'd guess they sell items of a sexual nature, few of them strictly legal.”

Bobby had questions about that—a billion or so—but felt it best to be quiet. Outside a pawnshop with three golden balls hanging over the door he paused to look at a dozen straight-razors which had been laid out on velvet with their blades partly open. They'd been arranged in a circle and the result was strange and (to Bobby) beautiful: looking at them was like looking at something removed from a deadly piece of machinery. The razors' handles were much more exotic than the handle of the one Ted used, too. One looked like ivory, another like ruby etched with thin gold lines, a third like crystal.

“If you bought one of those you'd be shaving in style, wouldn't you?” Bobby asked.

He thought Ted would smile, but he didn't. “When people buy razors like that, they don't shave with them, Bobby.”

“What do you mean?”

Ted wouldn't tell him, but he did buy him a sandwich called a gyro in a Greek delicatessen. It came in a folded-over piece of homemade bread and was oozing a dubious white sauce which to Bobby looked quite a lot like pimple-pus. He forced himself to try it because Ted said they were good. It turned out to be the best sandwich he'd ever eaten, as meaty as a hotdog or a hamburger from the Colony Diner but with an exotic taste that no hamburger or hotdog had ever had. And it was great to be eating on the sidewalk, strolling along with his friend, looking and being looked at.

“What do they call this part of town?” Bobby asked. “Does it have a name?”

“These days, who knows?” Ted said, and shrugged. “They used to call it Greektown. Then the Italians came, the Puerto Ricans, and now the Negroes. There's a novelist named David Goodis—the kind the college teachers never read, a genius of the drugstore paperback displays—who calls it ‘down there.' He says every city has a neighborhood like this one, where you can buy sex or marijuana or a parrot that talks dirty, where the men sit talking on stoops like those men across the street, where the women always seem to be yelling for their kids to come in unless they want a whipping, and where the wine always comes in a paper sack.” Ted pointed into the gutter, where the neck of a Thunderbird bottle did indeed poke out of a brown bag. “It's just down there, that's
what David Goodis says, the place where you don't have any use for your last name and you can buy almost anything if you have cash in your pocket.”

Down there
, Bobby thought, watching a trio of olive-skinned teenagers in gang jackets watch them as they passed.
This is the land of straight-razors and special souvenirs
.

The Criterion and Muncie's Department Store had never seemed so far away. And Broad Street? That and all of Harwich could have been in another solar system.

At last they came to a place called The Corner Pocket, Pool and Billiards, Automatic Games, Rhein-gold on Tap. There was also one of those banners reading
COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE
. As Bobby and Ted passed beneath it, a young man in a strappy tee-shirt and a chocolate-colored stingybrim like the kind Frank Sinatra wore came out the door. He had a long, thin case in one hand.
That's his pool-cue
, Bobby thought with fright and amazement.
He's got his pool-cue in that case like it was a guitar or something
.

“Who a hip cat, Daddy-O?” he asked Bobby, then grinned. Bobby grinned back. The kid with the pool-cue case made a gun with his finger and pointed at Bobby. Bobby made a gun with his own finger and pointed it back. The kid nodded as if to say
Yeah, okay, you hip, we both hip
and crossed the street, snapping the fingers of his free hand and bopping to the music in his head.

Ted looked up the street in one direction, then down in the other. Ahead of them, three Negro children were capering in the spray of a partly opened hydrant. Back the way they had come, two young
men—one white, the other maybe Puerto Rican—were taking the hubcaps off an old Ford, working with the rapid seriousness of doctors performing an operation. Ted looked at them, sighed, then looked at Bobby. “The Pocket's no place for a kid, even in the middle of the day, but I'm not going to leave you out on the street. Come on.” He took Bobby by the hand and led him inside.

What struck Bobby first was the smell of beer. It was impacted, as if folks had been drinking in here since the days when the pyramids were still in the planning stages. Next was the sound of a TV, not turned to
Bandstand
but to one of the late-afternoon soap operas (“Oh John, oh Marsha” shows was what his mother called them), and the click of pool-balls. Only after these things had registered did his eyes chip in their own input, because they'd needed to adjust. The place was very dim.

And it was long, Bobby saw. To their right was an archway, and beyond it a room that appeared almost endless. Most of the pool-tables were covered, but a few stood in brilliant islands of light where men strolled languidly about, pausing every now and then to bend and shoot. Other men, hardly visible, sat in high seats along the wall, watching. One was
getting his shoes shined. He looked about a thousand.

Straight ahead was a big room filled with Gottlieb pinball machines: a billion red and orange lights stuttered stomachache colors off a large sign which read
IF YOU TILT THE SAME MACHINE TWICE YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE.
A young man wearing another stingybrim hat—apparently the approved headgear for the bad motorscooters residing down there—was bent over Frontier Patrol, working the flippers frantically. A cigarette hung off his lower lip, the smoke rising past his face and the whorls of his combed-back hair. He was wearing a jacket tied around his waist and turned inside-out.

To the left of the lobby was a bar. It was from here that the sound of the TV and the smell of beer was coming. Three men sat there, each surrounded by empty stools, hunched over pilsner glasses. They didn't look like the happy beer-drinkers you saw in the ads; to Bobby they looked the loneliest people on earth. He wondered why they didn't at least huddle up and talk a little.

Closer by them was a desk. A fat man came rolling through the door behind it, and for a moment Bobby could hear the low sound of a radio playing. The fat man had a cigar in his mouth and was wearing a shirt covered with palm trees. He was snapping his fingers like the cool cat with the pool-cue case, and under his breath he was singing like this: “Choo-choo-
chow
, choo-choo-ka-chow-chow, choo-choo-
chow-chow!
” Bobby recognized the tune: “Tequila,” by The Champs.

“Who you, buddy?” the fat man asked Ted. “I don't know you. And he can't be in here, anyway. Can'tcha read?” He jerked a fat thumb with a dirty nail at
another sign, this one posted on the desk:
B-21 OR B-GONE!

“You don't know me, but I think you know Jimmy Girardi,” Ted said politely. “He told me you were the man to see . . . if you're Len Files, that is.”

“I'm Len,” the man said. All at once he seemed considerably warmer. He held out a hand so white and pudgy that it looked like the gloves Mickey and Donald and Goofy wore in the cartoons. “You know Jimmy Gee, huh? Goddam Jimmy Gee! Why, his grampa's back there getting a shine. He gets 'is boats shined a lot these days.” Len Files tipped Ted a wink. Ted smiled and shook the guy's hand.

“That your kid?” Len Files asked, bending over his desk to get a closer look at Bobby. Bobby could smell Sen-Sen mints and cigars on his breath, sweat on his body. The collar of his shirt was speckled with dandruff.

“He's a friend,” Ted said, and Bobby thought he might actually explode with happiness. “I didn't want to leave him on the street.”

“Yeah, unless you're willing to have to pay to get im back,” Len Files agreed. “You remind me of somebody, kid. Now why is that?”

Bobby shook his head, a little frightened to think he looked like anybody Len Files might know.

The fat man barely paid attention to Bobby's head-shake. He had straightened and was looking at Ted again. “I can't be having kids in here, Mr . . . . ?”

“Ted Brautigan.” He offered his hand. Len Files shook it.

“You know how it is, Ted. People in a business like mine, the cops keep tabs.”

“Of course. But he'll stand right here—won't you, Bobby?”

“Sure,” Bobby said.

“And our business won't take long. But it's a good little bit of business, Mr. Files—”

“Len.”

Len, of course, Bobby thought. Just Len. Because in here was down there.

“As I say, Len, this is a good piece of business I want to do. I think you'll agree.”

“If you know Jimmy Gee, you know I don't do the nickels and dimes,” Len said. “I leave the nickels and dimes to the niggers. What are we talking here? Patterson–Johansson?”

“Albini–Haywood. At The Garden tomorrow night?”

Len's eyes widened. Then his fat and unshaven cheeks spread in a smile. “Man oh man oh Manischewitz. We need to explore this.”