What Hearts (3 page)

Asa heard himself shriek. He could do it now, he could stay upright enough to keep the column of air open from his gut to his mouth, and he called up shriek after shriek and launched them into the air. He was not looking anywhere but up, and he realized that to
someone far away he too would seem to be trying to bite something out of the sky, like the people whom he had been unable to hear. But he knew he was being heard. He kept it up.

And then it was over. The train of cars slowed; everything stopped. He was sitting in the seat, the bar against his ribs. His mouth was open but silent. His mother was grabbing at him from the platform. She grabbed him beneath the arms and tried to pull him out, but the bar kept him in; she was weeping and calling him as if he were not right there. He said nothing. He had not yet adjusted to being free of the grip of the big ride, or perhaps he would have told her, quietly, that it was all right, at least for now.

SIX

He and Dave stood outside a telephone booth on a silent street a few blocks inland from the boardwalk. His mother was inside the booth,
speaking with his father. She looked a bit raw, and the light inside the booth seemed to fall sharply on her, like an astringent for skinned knees. The boy and the man said nothing as they watched her.

Asa held a string that led to a pale red balloon. It had been a lustrous ruby color when he had picked it out uninflated, but when the helium expanded it, the color faded. The balloon was a treat bought for him by Dave, but Dave had not especially wanted to give it. Asa's mother had insisted. Dave had gotten very angry at him for stopping the roller coaster. He had yelled at Asa, Called him a sissy and other things, spun him around by the shoulders, and pushed him back into the roller coaster car, saying he would damn well get right back on the horse. Asa's mother had intervened, grabbing Dave by the shirt front and telling him a few things. Dave stomped off, first retrieving some money from the tattooed man. They followed, but his mother caught up to Dave and talked to him fiercely, matching him step for step. After a few minutes they bought the balloon.

Now his mother was talking to his father. Asa waited. There was nothing to say to Dave. He was not certain there was anything to say to his father either, but he would have liked at least to listen to him. He waited for his mother to look up and motion him into the booth, but he did not really expect to be called. He knew there were things he could not be trusted to keep quiet about. It was complicated. It would not just be a boy talking to his father; it would never be just that anymore.

At some point the balloon simply burst. The string dropped and coiled on his hand, and a red flap of rubber plopped on top of it. Dave looked up. So did his mother, and he saw her mouth slacken for a second, then resume speaking. Asa continued to hold the string and rubber; he liked the color better this way.

His mother hung up the phone and came out of the booth. She gave a quick smile to Dave, raising her eyebrows, and a longer smile to Asa. She said, “Your father says he knows now that what we've done is best, because that's the first time a balloon of yours has popped and you haven't cried. He says he
knows now you have grown up a lot today.” She regarded him proudly, as if everything in the world had been suddenly settled.

They went back to the bungalows. Dave saw them to their door, and as Asa was stepping through the doorway, he stuck out his hand, to shake. Asa paused, then moved his string and rubber to his left hand and shook. Dave said, “Never mind getting back on the horse, Sport,” and went to his own bungalow. He did not say good night to Asa's mother.

There were two beds. Asa fell asleep in one of them before his mother had even turned out the light. He slept hard and did not dream. Some time later, he woke up.

It was dark in the bungalow, except for a thin line of light on one edge of the curtain over the small window. Asa listened for his mother's breathing. He heard only his own. No one else was there.

His eyes adjusted to the dark, and he got up. The sheet on his mother's bed was turned down. In the middle of the mattress on the side near Asa's bed was a round depression, where he supposed she had sat and watched
him sleep. Asa found his clothes and got dressed in the dark. He found his mother's purse and felt around inside for a couple of bills, which he put in his pocket.

He peeked past the edge of the curtain. The porch light was on. The macadam in front of the bungalow was clear. Quietly he opened the door and slipped out, closing it after him. Without a glance at number 10, he trotted off down the drive.

He found his way by working toward the glow of lights hanging out over the ocean. The streets were quiet, but the boardwalk still held a stream of people. They were different people this time: slower, without so many prizes and desserts, walking straighter, as if they were looking for something. He thought the aimless people he had seen earlier were all in bed now.

As he passed through the arch at the pier's entrance he noticed the red coating was flaking off the surfaces of the small bulbs, and something stirred in his memory, but he did not stop to think. He ran between the rides, most of which were motionless now, out to the
end of the pier and the platform for the roller coaster. The man with the tattoos was still there, still leaning. His pencil was gone; he smoked a cigarette instead.

He arched his eyebrows when Asa stepped up and held out his bills. The man watched him for a second, then said, “What the hell,” and took them, putting them in a pants pocket. He made the same backhanded wave as before, and Asa followed it.

He took the same car. He pulled the bar down himself this time, and clicked the chain across the cutaway, before the man could even jump up onto the platform. This time he did not watch the man reach into the dark machine and extract the huge lever; he knew what was happening, there was nothing new to see. He stared straight ahead at the sky and the slanting black water, which looked exactly the same as it had before. And as the engine kicked into gear and his car shot forward, he realized the peeling red light bulbs reminded him of radishes, and he had to try to remember that there had been some radishes that were
his
radishes. Had that been only
today
? As the car
banked hard into the first turn, he realized the things he had left behind were already hiding inside him; now, for the first time, his life had a past, a past that would not get any bigger, that would always be shrinking but would never disappear. Something else: he had always assumed there was only one way for his life to happen. Now he realized there were alternatives. A feeling, an object, a person could seem like one thing but be another; an action could seem as if it were taking one turn, but veer off another way. Anything could happen at any time. He was not on tracks.

He pushed the chrome bar off his lap. The car swayed out over the edge of the pier, staying on its course by the tightest of tensions. Asa stood up straight into the warm wind and gathered his strength, as if to jump, as if to fly, as if, as if, as if.

 

ONE

Standing in the doorway, looking in past the principal waiting to introduce him, Asa could see that his new fourth-grade class was just starting Rome. On one side of the room the boys were waving cardboard swords and wooden spears with tinfoil points; on the other side, the girls were wrapping themselves in white bedsheets. It had to be Rome. In his previous school they had already whipped through this part of history. But glancing around the room, he sensed a big difference here, a difference that gave him a little boost of excitement. The spears and togas, the number of fat books in the bookcases, the radiant messiness of wild drawings on the art bulletin board, the absence of the cardboard flashcards showing how the alphabet was
formed in cursive—these were all good signs. Asa could tell about a classroom's spirit almost by sniffing the air. Mrs. Brock, a short, plump, young woman who had waved at the principal and finished fastening a spearpoint before coming over, was going to be fine.

In his previous fourth grade the teacher had not been very good. She would not have dared to split the class up this way into groups. And swords? Never. They had spent two days sitting in their five rows of six desks, talking only about the splendor of Roman banquets, as if the entire civilization had been based on eating a lot while lying down. The other teacher had also been pretty bad at bringing Asa into the class, though he had arrived only four days after the beginning of the school year. She sagged when he came to the door, shaking her head at the rows of neatly occupied desks. He knew she did not dislike him; she was just not up to the task of stirring a new kid into her stew. That's how it usually was: Two teachers in the second grade, two in the third, and now he was on his second in the fourth: he felt sorry for them all. He wanted to reassure
them, the first time he appeared at the doors of their classrooms in the middle of a lesson—he wanted to tell them it was okay if they just let him be: he would find a way in all by himself, just far enough in to satisfy everyone, and then before long he would be gone.

Mrs. Brock glanced a quick smile at him, then gave her attention to the principal. It was a good smile that said
Let's get this official guy out of the way and well have plenty of time to get together
. Asa exhaled silently with relief.

As soon as the principal withdrew, Mrs. Brock pulled Asa into the room and guided him over to the huddle of boys. A waft of soft perfume rose warmly from the arm that lay across his shoulders. “All right,” she said, handing him a sword, “you'll be—let's see—oh, Antonius. Thursday you and these three senators will present a report to the tribunal on the prospects for war with Carthage. You be the one to talk about the elephants, okay? Okay, guys?”

“I was going to do the elephants,” said a large boy with a thick shirt, eyeing Asa.

“Then you do the weapons of Carthage
now, Mark,” said Mrs. Brock. “You're the wicked type, so that ought to keep you happy. Do pikes and hooks and scimitars and whatever else the Carthaginians planned on sticking into your flabby pink Roman rib cage. Have you,” she said, turning to Asa with what he could only recognize as brilliant intuition, “ever seen an elephant?”

“African or Indian?” he said. He blushed, ashamed of showing off, for he had seen both in the National Zoo.

“Lord help us, a smarty-pants,” she said, turning away to go rewrap the girls in togas.

“So,” said Mark, pointing at Asa with his sword and bringing him across the threshold of the class with the easy nature of the threat, “you better give us a good idea what we should use to
kill
those suckers.”

He did. His report a few days later stunned them all. Oh, Asa knew how to make the most of an opportunity for debut. He was aware that every time he came to a new class he had the chance to create himself in the eyes of the strangers with whom he would spend the next little while—a chance the hometown kids
never got, being familiar with each other since the beginning of kindergarten or earlier. Asa, by now, knew what land of attention would be aimed at him, knew which aspects of curiosity to exploit and which to deflect. He was good. He could put on a show.

In the middle of the tribunal presentation he unfurled huge drawings done on the floor of his bedroom on sheets of manila paper, taped together to twelve times the usual size—strangely colored drawings of grotesque exaggerations of elephants as they might have been imagined by Romans who had, after all, never seen one. He struck a senatorial tone that vacillated between military bravado and fascinated fear, emphasizing with wonder the fabulous violence that could be wrought by these wild things driven by wild men. He finished with a roaring challenge to the citizens to “see to our defenses lest we be torn, gored, and rent asunder by the ravaging fury of unknown forces not so distant in time and place!” The boys rose spontaneously to their feet with a roar, shaking their weapons defiantly, devotedly. The girls stared, impressed; they could
appreciate a good report. One girl later asked soberly where he had acquired the archaic language. He confessed it was from the Bible. She nodded thoughtfully.

Even before his debut Asa had found ways into and out of the needs and enthusiasms of quite a few of his classmates. Steve was afraid of being stupid; so when talking to Steve, he used words that were long but common, and left sentences unfinished, groping for a word Steve could leap to provide. Cheryl liked to laugh at things no one else would find funny, so Asa dotted their talks with quirky details and reacted with a surprised thrill when she cackled. Lee was a comic-book freak who mystified other kids by comparing the subject of every conversation to some obscure subplot from a superhero tale, which he related with awkward, rushed specificity. Asa, who knew all the subplots, brightened Lee's eyes by providing a detail here and there (and a crisp translation, for Lee's confused listeners).

Everyone had an opening. Finding it only took alertness. As for slipping through the openings—well, it just seemed to happen. Asa
was not being artificial or even artful. He did not pretend or dupe. With Steve, for example, it seemed he really
couldn't
think of that missing word, though at another time he had words by the hundreds to fill every blank. It was all managed above anyone's notice. This gave the illusion of naturalness, even, sometimes, to Asa himself.

After Rome was finished, he imagined he had made up for the weeks lost at the beginning of the year, if not for the years lost from kindergarten on. He had roles; he could be counted on for certain things. On the playground he had shown what he could do with the various tops, yo-yos, pocketknives, and harmonicas that demanded demonstrations of proficiency from every boy, in every school. Though he had never been anywhere long enough to learn team sports, when it came to portable skills, he could
play
. In the classroom his strengths had come out clearly, too, as he was called on for this and that. He could be counted on to whip through big-number multiplications and divisions in his head with an arrogant immediacy. And his
long sentences—which filled themselves in as they wound their way around the subject of a question, opening impossible challenges of tense and sense in their early clauses but always, always coming to a brilliant conclusion—became a kind of group exercise in suspense and release as everyone felt the momentum pick up, heard the possibilities for error accrue, kept track of the bits that would be required for final resolution, and applauded with laughter as he boisterously provided them. He would have bet that his classmates, if asked about him, would not have recalled in their first thought, or even their fifth, that he had been inserted into the class six weeks into the year.

So it was something of a shock when Mrs. Brock clapped her hands one afternoon early in his third week and said, “All right, my little prima donnas, we've been taking it easy, but now it's time to rehearse for Show Night,” and everyone separated into configurations he had never seen, twos, fives, boys with girls, singletons. He stood at his desk, blinking, uncertain. Right away Mrs. Brock noticed him, and put
her hands on her cheeks in mock horror.

“Asa, what a chucklehead I am,” she said. “I completely forgot.”

She explained that every year the PTA kicked off its membership drive in the late fall with a variety show put on by a single class. This year was the fourth grade's turn. During the second week of school, each child had chosen something to do for the show. Six of them together were enacting a play they had written about the first Thanksgiving. Two others were putting together a clown act, in which, she suspected, they planned to throw a few of the pies used as props by the earlier pilgrims. One girl was dressing up as Robert E. Lee and giving short speeches about how the South actually had won the Civil War. What, she asked, did Asa want to do?

What
did
Asa want to do? Well, his project had been making friends, his concentration so keen that, at this moment, he was unable to think of himself doing something alone.

It did not take Mrs. Brock long to sense that he was at a loss. She motioned to the three solo acts, two boys and the girl who would be
Robert E. Lee. They came over. “Okay,” she said. “Who wants a partner? Amy Louise?”

“Mrs. Brock I cannot possibly,” said the girl, clearly offended, perhaps by the implication that Robert E. Lee could be joined as an equal by anyone, or perhaps by the implication that she herself could.

“Fine. Generals can be very difficult colleagues anyway, Asa,” said Mrs. Brock. “How about you, Harold?”

Harold looked confused. He often did. “It ain't nothing but radio,” he said.

“Of course, of course.” Mrs. Brock patted his shoulder. “Harold is a ham radio nut. His performance is to set up his receiver and pull in a broadcast from Russia. Very exciting, but not the sort of thing that invites collaboration. Well, Joel?”

Joel was a tall boy with fuzzy hair and a red face, all the parts of which seemed to be straining outward in a parody of aggressive friendliness toward all: his eyes popped, his nose arched, his cheeks bulged, even his teeth seemed to reach. He had spoken to Asa often, especially in his first days in the class; he had
even invited the new boy over to play at his house after school two or three times. Asa had not been much interested; he had more challenging conquests to mount. Now, at the prospect of sharing, Joel was about to burst with goodwill.

“Mrs. Brock, Asa would be welcome to recite with me.” He shifted his grin to Asa and held out a very old book.

“Joel is going to recite a poem,” she explained. As Asa made no move, she took the book herself and thumbed through it. “Something by Eugene Field, wasn't it?”

Joel nodded. “ ‘Little Boy Blue,'” he said. “Not the nursery rhyme with the ‘come blow your horn' stuff.
This
is a really neat poem. We can say it together, if you like. That would be fun. We can practice so we match. Like the Everly Brothers.”

Mrs. Brock winced slightly. “That might, well, be a little
much
, boys. I mean, two voices in unison would sort of draw attention away from the—the lonesome sadness of the single child passing away, you see. Break up the effect. But maybe you could alternate stanzas….”
She held the book out to Asa. He had no choice but to take it.

“Sure!” said Joel.

Asa frowned into the text. “Well,” he heard himself say, “okay. Thanks.”

At home, in his room alone, he thought of a dozen things he would rather do for the show than recite a poem called “Little Boy Blue” with Joel. Each inspired him to get up and go to the telephone. He even looked up Mrs. Brock's number.
Look
, he would tell her,
I want to juggle large chrome rings
, or
I want to present the calls of twenty birds
, or
I want to play my guitar
. He would make a point of sounding very simply excited, as if Joel did not enter into it at all, as if his own sheer creativity were driving him to nix the deal he had made that afternoon.

The only thing that made Asa pause before dialing Mrs. Brock's number was the fact that he could not juggle, he could not imitate the calls of birds, he owned no guitar. There was no doubt in his mind that he could scramble and master one of these tasks by the time he needed to perform; he could do anything he thought of doing, he was certain. But Joel had
told him Mrs. Brock asked the other students to give a quick demonstration of their tricks so that she could approve or redirect their showmanship. In fact, she had suggested that two of them make changes: Susan, a haughty, religious girl, had wanted to sing three Baptist hymns; but she could not carry a tune, so she was now slated to recite three psalms; and Peter, whose voice-and-gesture impressions of John Wayne, President Eisenhower, and Ed Sullivan had all seemed exactly alike, was now going to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Streets of Laredo” while dressed as a cowboy.
However
, Joel reported with ecstasy,
however
, Asa was approved without audition to recite “Little Boy Blue.” Imagine! Well, Asa, who had a feeling Mrs. Brock knew she was taking a pretty slim risk in letting him mumble a few lines unapproved, did not want to test that faith. He had a feeling it would not extend to juggling and birdcalls.

He sat in his room looking out the window. Outside, the moon sat high and round and white in the dense, dark sky. The moon was isolated, touching nothing, having no effect on the
darkness around it; it seemed as if any minute the vastly greater darkness would simply take over, and the moon would be no more. Yet down in his backyard a small apple tree was casting a thick shadow on the lawn. The shadow was there because the tree was standing in the way of the moonlight, which shone bright as lightning on everything in sight. How could this be? How could the moonlight get all the way here through the sky without leaving some silver trace? Asa felt his curiosity and intelligence quicken, and he knew he could figure it out in time, and after he did, he would love moonlight. From insight to love was not a big step.