Hearts In Atlantis (9 page)

But . . . it seemed like he read my mind. What about that?

Oh, he was wrong, that was all, mistaken about what he thought he'd heard. Or maybe Ted
had
read his mind, read it with that essentially uninteresting adult ESP, peeling guilt off his face like a wet decal off a piece of glass. God knew his mother could always do that . . . at least until today.

But—

But nothing. Ted was a nice guy who knew a lot about books, but he was no mind-reader. No more than Sully-John Sullivan was a magician, or ever would be.

“It's all misdirection,” Bobby murmured. He slipped his hands out from under his pillow, crossed them at the wrists, wagged them. The shadow of a dove flew across the moonlight on his chest.

Bobby smiled, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

•   •   •

The next morning he sat on the front porch and read several pieces aloud from the Harwich Sunday
Journal
. Ted perched on the porch glider, listening quietly and smoking Chesterfields. Behind him and to his left, the
curtains flapped in and out of the open windows of the Garfield front room. Bobby imagined his mom sitting in the chair where the light was best, sewing basket beside her, listening and hemming skirts (hemlines were going down again, she'd told him a week or two before; take them up one year, pick out the stitches the following spring and lower them again, all because a bunch of poofers in New York and London said to, and why she bothered she didn't know). Bobby had no idea if she really was there or not, the open windows and blowing curtains meant nothing by themselves, but he imagined it all the same. When he was a little older it would occur to him that he had
always
imagined her there—outside doors, in that part of the bleachers where the shadows were too thick to see properly, in the dark at the top of the stairs, he had always imagined she was there.

The sports pieces he read were interesting (Maury Wills was stealing up a storm), the feature articles less so, the opinion columns boring and long and incomprehensible, full of phrases like “fiscal responsibility” and “economic indicators of a recessionary nature.” Even so, Bobby didn't mind reading them. He was doing a job, after all, earning dough, and a lot of jobs were boring at least some of the time. “You have to work for your Wheaties,” his mother sometimes said after Mr. Biderman had kept her late. Bobby was proud just to be able to get a phrase like “economic indicators of a recessionary nature” to come off his tongue. Besides, the other job—the hidden job—arose from Ted's crazy idea that some men were out to get him, and Bobby would have felt weird taking money just for doing that one; would have felt like he
was tricking Ted somehow even though it had been Ted's idea in the first place.

That was still part of his job, though, crazy or not, and he began doing it that Sunday afternoon. Bobby walked around the block while his mom was napping, looking for either low men in yellow coats or signs of them. He saw a number of interesting things—over on Colony Street a woman arguing with her husband about something, the two of them standing nose-to-nose like Gorgeous George and Haystacks Calhoun before the start of a rassling match; a little kid on Asher Avenue bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock; liplocked teenagers outside of Spicer's Variety Store on the corner of Commonwealth and Broad; a panel truck with the interesting slogan
YUMMY FOR THE TUMMY
written on the side—but he saw no yellow coats or lost-pet announcements on phone poles; not a single kite tail hung from a single telephone wire.

He stopped in at Spicer's for a penny gumball and gleeped the bulletin board, which was dominated by photos of this year's Miss Rheingold candidates. He saw two cards offering car for sale by owner, but neither was upside down. There was another one that said
MUST SELL MY BACKYARD POOL, GOOD SHAPE, YOUR KIDS WILL LOVE IT
, and that one was crooked, but Bobby didn't guess crooked counted.

On Asher Avenue he saw a whale of a Buick parked at a hydrant, but it was bottle-green, and Bobby didn't think it qualified as loud and vulgar in spite of the portholes up the sides of the hood and the grille, which looked like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish.

On Monday he continued looking for low men on his way to and from school. He saw nothing . . . but Carol Gerber, who was walking with him and S-J, saw him looking. His mother was right, Carol was really sharp.

“Are the commie agents after the plans?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You keep staring everywhere. Even behind you.”

For a moment Bobby considered telling them what Ted had hired him to do, then decided it would be a bad idea. It might have been a good one if he believed there was really something to look for—three pairs of eyes instead of one, Carol's sharp little peepers included—but he didn't. Carol and Sully-John knew that he had a job reading Ted the paper every day, and that was all right. It was enough. If he told them about the low men, it would feel like making fun, somehow. A betrayal.

“Commie agents?” Sully asked, whirling around. “Yeah, I see em, I see em!” He drew down his mouth and made the
eh-eh-eh
noise again (it was his favorite). Then he staggered, dropped his invisible tommygun, clutched his chest. “They got me! I'm hit bad! Go on without me! Give my love to Rose!”

“I'll give it to my aunt's fat fanny,” Carol said, and elbowed him.

“I'm looking for guys from St. Gabe's, that's all,” Bobby said.

This was plausible; boys from St. Gabriel the Steadfast Upper and Secondary were always harassing the Harwich Elementary kids as the Elementary kids walked to school—buzzing them on their bikes, shouting that the boys were sissies, that the girls “put
out” . . . which Bobby was pretty sure meant tongue-kissing and letting boys touch their titties.

“Nah, those dinkberries don't come along until later,” Sully-John said. “Right now they're all still home puttin on their crosses and combin their hair back like Bobby Rydell.”

“Don't swear,” Carol said, and elbowed him again.

Sully-John looked wounded. “Who swore? I didn't swear.”

“Yes you did.”

“I did not, Carol.”

“Did.”

“No sir, did not.”

“
Yes
sir, did too, you said dinkberries.”

“That's not a swear! Dinkberries are
berries!
” S-J looked at Bobby for help, but Bobby was looking up at Asher Avenue, where a Cadillac was cruising slowly by. It was big, and he supposed it was a little flashy, but wasn't any Cadillac? This one was painted a conservative light brown and didn't look low to him. Besides, the person at the wheel was a woman.

“Yeah? Show me a picture of a dinkberry in the encyclopedia and maybe I'll believe you.”

“I ought to poke you,” Sully said amiably. “Show you who's boss. Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

“Me Carol, you Jughead. Here.” Carol thrust three books—arithmetic,
Adventures in Spelling
, and
The Little House on the Prairie
—into S-J's hands. “Carry my books cause you swore.”

Sully-John looked more wounded than ever. “Why should I have to carry your stupid books even if I
did
swear, which I didn't?”

“It's pennants,” Carol said.

“What the heck is pennants?”

“Making up for something you do wrong. If you swear or tell a lie, you have to do pennants. One of the St. Gabe's boys told me. Willie, his name is.”

“You shouldn't hang around with them,” Bobby said. “They can be mean.” He knew this from personal experience. Just after Christmas vacation ended, three St. Gabe's boys had chased him down Broad Street, threatening to beat him up because he had “looked at them wrong.” They would have done it, too, Bobby thought, if the one in the lead hadn't slipped in the slush and gone to his knees. The others had tripped over him, allowing Bobby just time enough to nip in through the big front door of 149 and turn the lock. The St. Gabe's boys had hung around outside for a little while, then had gone away after promising Bobby that they would “see him later.”

“They're not all hoods, some of them are okay,” Carol said. She looked at Sully-John, who was carrying her books, and hid a smile with one hand. You could get S-J to do anything if you talked fast and sounded sure of yourself. It would have been nicer to have Bobby carry her books, but it wouldn't have been any good unless he asked her. Someday he might; she was an optimist. In the meantime it was nice to be walking here between them in the morning sunshine. She stole a glance at Bobby, who was looking down at a hopscotch grid drawn on the sidewalk. He was so cute, and he didn't even know it. Somehow that was the cutest thing of all.

•   •   •

The last week of school passed as it always did, with a maddening, half-crippled slowness. On those early June days Bobby thought the smell of the paste in the library was almost strong enough to gag a maggot, and geography seemed to last ten thousand years. Who cared how much tin there was in Paraguay?

At recess Carol talked about how she was going to her aunt Cora and uncle Ray's farm in Pennsylvania for a week in July; S-J went on and on about the week of camp he'd won and how he was going to shoot arrows at targets and go out in a canoe every day he was there. Bobby, in turn, told them about the great Maury Wills, who might set a record for base-stealing that would never be broken in their lifetime.

His mom was increasingly preoccupied, jumping each time the telephone rang and then running for it, staying up past the late news (and sometimes, Bobby suspected, until the Nite-Owl Movie was over), and only picking at her meals. Sometimes she would have long, intense conversations on the phone with her back turned and her voice lowered (as if Bobby wanted to eavesdrop on her conversations, anyway). Sometimes she'd go to the telephone, start to dial it, then drop it back in its cradle and return to the couch.

On one of these occasions Bobby asked her if she had forgotten what number she wanted to call. “Seems like I've forgotten a lot of things,” she muttered, and then: “Mind your beeswax, Bobby-O.”

He might have noticed more and worried even more than he did—she was getting thin and had picked up the cigarette habit again after almost stopping for two years—if he hadn't had lots of stuff to occupy his own mind and time. The best thing was
the adult library card, which seemed like a better gift, a more
inspired
gift, each time he used it. Bobby felt there were a billion science-fiction novels alone in the adult section that he wanted to read. Take Isaac Asimov, for instance. Under the name of Paul French, Mr. Asimov wrote science-fiction novels for kids about a space pilot named Lucky Starr, and they were pretty good. Under his own name he had written other novels, even better ones. At least three of them were about robots. Bobby loved robots. Robby the Robot in
Forbidden Planet
was one of the all-time great movie characters, in his opinion, totally ripshit, and Mr. Asimov's were almost as good. Bobby thought he would be spending a lot of time with them in the summer ahead. (Sully called this great writer Isaac Ass-Move, but of course Sully was almost totally ignorant about books.)

Going to school he looked for the men in the yellow coats, or signs of them; going to the library after school he did the same. Because school and library were in opposite directions, Bobby felt he was covering a pretty good part of Harwich. He never expected to actually see any low men, of course. After supper, in the long light of evening, he would read the paper to Ted, either on the porch or in Ted's kitchen. Ted had followed Liz Garfield's advice and gotten a fan, and Bobby's mom no longer seemed concerned that Bobby should read to “Mr. Brattigan” out on the porch. Some of this was her growing preoccupation with her own adult matters, Bobby felt, but perhaps she was also coming to trust Ted a little more. Not that trust was the same as liking. Not that it had come easily, either.

One night while they were on the couch watching
Wyatt Earp
, his mom turned to Bobby almost fiercely and said, “Does he ever touch you?”

Bobby understood what she was asking, but not why she was so wound up. “Well, sure,” he said. “He claps me on the back sometimes, and once when I was reading the paper to him and screwed up some really long word three times in a row he gave me a Dutch rub, but he doesn't roughhouse or anything. I don't think he's strong enough for stuff like that. Why?”

“Never mind,” she said. “He's fine, I guess. Got his head in the clouds, no question about it, but he doesn't seem like a  . . .” She trailed off, watching the smoke from her Kool cigarette rise in the living-room air. It went up from the coal in a pale gray ribbon and then disappeared, making Bobby think of the way the characters in Mr. Simak's
Ring Around the Sun
followed the spiraling top into other worlds.

At last she turned to him again and said, “If he ever touches you in a way you don't like, you come and tell me. Right away. You hear?”

“Sure, Mom.” There was something in her look that made him remember once when he'd asked her how a woman knew she was going to have a baby.
She bleeds every month
, his mom had said.
If there's no blood, she knows it's because the blood is going into a baby
. Bobby had wanted to ask where this blood came out when there was no baby being made (he remembered a nosebleed his mom had had once, but no other instances of maternal bleeding). The look on her face, however, had made him drop the subject. She wore the same look now.

Actually there
had
been other touches: Ted might
run one of his big hands across Bobby's crewcut, kind of patting the bristles; he would sometimes gently catch Bobby's nose between his knuckles and intone
Sound it out!
if Bobby mispronounced a word; if they spoke at the same moment he would hook one of his little fingers around one of Bobby's little fingers and say
Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill
. Soon Bobby was saying it with him, their little fingers locked, their voices as matter-of-fact as people saying pass the peas or how you doing.