Hearts In Atlantis (25 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I'm rambling. Why don't you go out for awhile? Stretch your legs? I might lie down for a bit. I didn't sleep very well last night.”

“Okay.” Bobby guessed a little fresh air—even if it was
hot
fresh air—might do him good. And while it was interesting to listen to Ted talk, he had started to feel as if the apartment walls were closing in on him. It was knowing Ted was going, Bobby supposed.
Now there was a sad little rhyme for you: knowing he was going.

For a moment, as he went back into his room to get his baseball glove, the keyring from The Corner Pocket crossed his mind—he was going to give it to Carol so she'd know they were going steady. Then he remembered Harry Doolin, Richie O'Meara, and Willie Shearman. They were out there someplace, sure they were, and if they caught him by himself they'd probably beat the crap out of him. For the first time in two or three days, Bobby found himself wishing for Sully. Sully was a little kid like him, but he was tough. Doolin and his friends might beat him up, but Sully-John would make them pay for the privilege. S-J was at camp, though, and that was that.

Bobby never considered staying in—he couldn't hide all summer from the likes of Willie Shearman, that would be buggy—but as he went outside he reminded himself that he had to be careful, had to be on the lookout for them. As long as he saw them coming, there would be no problem.

With the St. Gabe's boys on his mind, Bobby left 149 with no further thought of the keyfob, his special souvenir of down there. It lay on the bathroom shelf next to the toothglass, right where he had left it the night before.

•   •   •

He tramped all over Harwich, it seemed—from Broad Street to Commonwealth Park (no St. Gabe's boys on Field C today; the American Legion team was there, taking batting practice and shagging flies in the hot sun), from the park to the town square, from the town square to the railway station. As he stood in
the little newsstand kiosk beneath the railway overpass, looking at paperbacks (Mr. Burton, who ran the place, would let you look for awhile as long as you didn't handle what he called “the moichandise”), the town whistle went off, startling them both.

“Mothera God, what's up widdat?” Mr. Burton asked indignantly. He had spilled packs of gum all over the floor and now stooped to pick them up, his gray change-apron hanging down. “It ain't but quarter past eleven!”

“It's early, all right,” Bobby agreed, and left the newsstand soon after. Browsing had lost its charms for him. He walked out to River Avenue, stopping at the Tip-Top Bakery to buy half a loaf of day-old bread (two cents) and to ask Georgie Sullivan how S-J was.

“He's fine,” S-J's oldest brother said. “We got a postcard on Tuesday says he misses the fambly and wantsa come home. We get one Wednesday says he's learning how to dive. The one this morning says he's having the time of his life, he wantsa stay forever.” He laughed, a big Irish boy of twenty with big Irish arms and shoulders. “He may wanta stay forever, but Ma'd miss im like hell if he stayed up there. You gonna feed the ducks with some of that?”

“Yeah, like always.”

“Don't let em nibble your fingers. Those damned river ducks carry diseases. They—”

In the town square the Municipal Building clock began to chime noon, although it was still only quarter of.

“What's going on today?” Georgie asked. “First the whistle blows early, now the damned town clock's off-course.”

“Maybe it's the heat,” Bobby said.

Georgie looked at Bobby doubtfully. “Well . . . it's as good an explanation as any.”

Yeah
, Bobby thought, going out.
And quite a bit safer than some
.

•   •   •

Bobby went down River Avenue, munching his bread as he walked. By the time he found a bench near the Housatonic River, most of the half-loaf had disappeared down his own throat. Ducks came waddling eagerly out of the reeds and Bobby began to scatter the remaining bread for them, amused as always by the greedy way they ran for the chunks and the way they threw their heads back to eat them.

After awhile he began to grow drowsy. He looked out over the river, at the nets of reflected light shimmering on its surface, and grew drowsier still. He had slept the previous night but his sleep hadn't been restful. Now he dozed off with his hands full of breadcrumbs. The ducks finished with what was on the grass and then drew closer to him, quacking in low, ruminative tones. The clock in the town square bonged the hour of two at twelve-twenty, causing people downtown to shake their heads and ask each other what the world was coming to. Bobby's doze deepened by degrees, and when a shadow fell over him, he didn't see or sense it.

“Hey. Kid.”

The voice was quiet and intense. Bobby sat up with a gasp and a jerk, his hands opening and spilling out the remaining bread. Those snakes began to crawl around in his belly again. It wasn't Willie Shearman or Richie O'Meara or Harry Doolin—even coming
out of a doze he knew that—but Bobby almost wished it had been one of them. Even all three. A beating wasn't the worst thing that could happen to you. No, not the worst. Cripes, why did he have to go and fall
asleep?

“Kid.”

The ducks were stepping on Bobby's feet, squabbling over the unexpected windfall. Their wings were fluttering against his ankles and his shins, but the feeling was far away, far away. He could see the shadow of a man's head on the grass ahead of him. The man was standing behind him.

“Kid.”

Slowly and creakily, Bobby turned. The man's coat would be yellow and somewhere on it would be an eye, a staring red eye.

But the man who stood there was wearing a tan summer suit, the jacket pooched out by a little stomach that was starting to grow into a big stomach, and Bobby knew at once it wasn't one of
them
, after all. There was no itching behind his eyes, no black threads across his field of vision . . . but the major thing was that this wasn't some
creature
just pretending to be a person; it
was
a person.

“What?” Bobby asked, his voice low and muzzy. He still couldn't believe he'd gone to sleep like that, blanked out like that. “What do you want?”

“I'll give you two bucks to let me blow you,” the man in the tan suit said. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out his wallet. “We can go behind that tree over there. No one'll see us. And you'll like it.”

“No,” Bobby said, getting up. He wasn't completely
sure what the man in the tan suit was talking about, but he had a pretty good idea. The ducks scattered backward, but the bread was too tempting to resist and they returned, pecking and dancing around Bobby's sneakers. “I have to go home now. My mother—”

The man came closer, still holding out his wallet. It was as if he'd decided to give the whole thing to Bobby, never mind the two lousy dollars. “You don't have to do it to me, I'll just do it to you. Come on, what do you say? I'll make it three dollars.” The man's voice was trembling now, jigging and jagging up and down the scale, at one moment seeming to laugh, at the next almost to weep. “You can go to the movies for a month on three dollars.”

“No, really, I—”

“You'll like it, all my boys like it.” He reached out for Bobby and suddenly Bobby thought of Ted taking hold of his shoulders, Ted putting his hands behind his neck, Ted pulling him closer until they were almost close enough to kiss. That wasn't like this . . . and yet it was. Somehow it was.

Without thinking about what he was doing, Bobby bent and grabbed one of the ducks. He lifted it in a surprised squawking flurry of beak and wings and paddling feet, had just a glimpse of one black bead of an eye, and then threw it at the man in the tan suit. The man yelled and put his hands up to shield his face, dropping his wallet.

Bobby ran.

•   •   •

He was passing through the square, headed back home, when he saw a poster on a telephone pole outside the candy store. He walked over to it and read it
with silent horror. He couldn't remember his dream of the night before, but something like this had been in it. He was positive.

HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN!

He is an
OLD MONGREL
but
WE LOVE HIM!

BRAUTIGAN
has
WHITE FUR
and
BLUE EYES!

He is
FRIENDLY!

Will
EAT SCRAPS FROM YOUR HAND!

We will pay
A VERY LARGE REWARD

($ $ $ $)

IF YOU HAVE SEEN BRAUTIGAN!

CALL
HOUSITONIC 5-8337!

(
OR
)

BRING BRAUTIGAN
to 745 Highgate Avenue!

Home of the
SAGAMORE FAMILY!

This isn't a good day
, Bobby thought, watching his hand reach out and pull the poster off the telephone pole. Beyond it, hanging from a bulb on the marquee of the Harwich Theater, he saw a dangling blue kite tail.
This isn't a good day at all. I never should have gone out of the apartment. In fact, I should have stayed in bed
.

HOusitonic 5-8337, just like on the poster about Phil the Welsh Corgi . . . except if there was a HOusitonic exchange in Harwich, Bobby had never heard of it. Some of the numbers were on the HArwich exchange. Others were COmmonwealth. But HOusitonic? No. Not here, not in Bridgeport, either.

He crumpled the poster up and threw it in the
KEEP OUR TOWN CLEAN N GREEN
basket on the corner, but on the other side of the street he found another
just like it. Farther along he found a third pasted to a corner mailbox. He tore these down, as well. The low men were either closing in or desperate. Maybe both. Ted couldn't go out at all today—Bobby would have to tell him that. And he'd have to be ready to run. He'd tell him that, too.

Bobby cut through the park, almost running himself in his hurry to get home, and he barely heard the small, gasping cry which came from his left as he passed the baseball fields: “Bobby  . . .”

He stopped and looked toward the grove of trees where Carol had taken him the day before when he started to bawl. And when the gasping cry came again, he realized it was
her
.

“Bobby if it's you please help me  . . .”

He turned off the cement path and ducked into the copse of trees. What he saw there made him drop his baseball glove on the ground. It was an Alvin Dark model, that glove, and later it was gone. Someone came along and just kifed it, he supposed, and so what? As that day wore on, his lousy baseball glove was the very least of his concerns.

Carol sat beneath the same elm tree where she had comforted him. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Her face was ashy gray. Black shock-circles ringed her eyes, giving her a raccoony look. A thread of blood trickled from one of her nostrils. Her left arm lay across her midriff, pulling her shirt tight against the beginning nubs of what would be breasts in another year or two. She held the elbow of that arm cupped in her right hand.

She was wearing shorts and a smock-type blouse with long sleeves—the kind of thing you just slipped on
over your head. Later, Bobby would lay much of the blame for what happened on that stupid shirt of hers. She must have worn it to protect against sunburn; it was the only reason he could think of to wear long sleeves on such a murderously hot day. Had she picked it out herself or had Mrs. Gerber forced her into it? And did it matter?
Yes
, Bobby would think when there was time to think.
It mattered, you're damned right it mattered
.

But for now the blouse with its long sleeves was peripheral. The only thing he noticed in that first instant was Carol's upper left arm. It seemed to have not one shoulder but two.

“Bobby,” she said, looking at him with shining dazed eyes. “They hurt me.”

She was in shock, of course. He was in shock himself by then, running on instinct. He tried to pick her up and she screamed in pain—dear God, what a sound.

“I'll run and get help,” he said, lowering her back. “You just sit there and try not to move.”

She was shaking her head—carefully, so as not to joggle her arm. Her blue eyes were nearly black with pain and terror. “No, Bobby, no, don't leave me here, what if they come back? What if they come back and hurt me worse?” Parts of what happened on that long hot Thursday were lost to him, lost in the shockwave, but that part always stood clear: Carol looking up at him and saying
What if they come back and hurt me worse?

“But . . . Carol  . . .”

“I can walk. If you help me, I can walk.”

Bobby put a tentative arm around her waist, hoping she wouldn't scream again. That had been bad.

Carol got slowly to her feet, using the trunk of the tree to support her back. Her left arm moved a little as
she rose. That grotesque double shoulder bulged and flexed. She moaned but didn't scream, thank God.

“You better stop,” Bobby said.

“No, I want to get out of here. Help me. Oh God, it hurts.”

Once she was all the way up it seemed a little better. They made their way out of the grove with the slow side-by-side solemnity of a couple about to be married. Beyond the shade of the trees the day seemed even hotter than before and blindingly bright. Bobby looked around and saw no one. Somewhere, deeper in the park, a bunch of little kids (probably Sparrows or Robins from Sterling House) were singing a song, but the area around the baseball fields was utterly deserted: no kids, no mothers wheeling baby carriages, no sign of Officer Raymer, the local cop who would sometimes buy you an ice cream or a bag of peanuts if he was in a good mood. Everyone was inside, hiding from the heat.

Still moving slowly, Bobby with his arm around Carol's waist, they walked along the path which came out on the corner of Commonwealth and Broad. Broad Street Hill was as deserted as the park; the paving shimmered like the air over an incinerator. There wasn't a single pedestrian or moving car in sight.