Hearts In Atlantis (20 page)

Len Files and Ted were coming back now, both of them looking happy. Len, in fact, looked like the cat that ate the canary (as Bobby's mother often said). Ted paused to pass another, briefer, word with the old guy, who nodded and smiled. When Ted and Len got back to the lobby area, Ted started toward the telephone booth just inside the door. Len took his arm and steered him toward the desk instead.

As Ted stepped behind it, Len ruffled Bobby's hair. “I know who you look like,” he said. “It come to me while I was in the back room. Your dad was—”

“Garfield. Randy Garfield.” Bobby looked up at Len, who so resembled his sister, and thought how odd and sort of wonderful it was to be linked that way to your own blood kin. Linked so closely people who didn't even know you could sometimes pick you out of a crowd. “Did you like him, Mr. Files?”

“Who, Randy? Sure, he was a helluva gizmo.” But Len Files seemed a little vague. He hadn't noticed Bobby's father in the same way his sister had, Bobby
decided; Len probably wouldn't remember about the Jo Stafford song or how Randy Garfield would give you the shirt right off his back. He wouldn't give a drunk a drink, though; he wouldn't do that. “Your pal's all right, too,” Len went on, more enthusiastic now. “I like the high class and the high class likes me, but I don't get real shooters like him in here often.” He turned to Ted, who was hunting nearsightedly through the phonebook. “Try Circle Taxi. KEnmore 6-7400.”

“Thanks,” Ted said.

“Don't mention it.” Len brushed past Ted and went through the door behind the desk. Bobby caught another brief glimpse of the living room and the big cross. When the door shut, Ted looked over at Bobby and said: “You bet five hundred bucks on a prizefight and you don't have to use the pay phone like the rest of the shmucks. Such a deal, huh?”

Bobby felt as if all the wind had been sucked out of him. “You bet
five hundred dollars
on Hurricane Haywood?”

Ted shook a Chesterfield out of his pack, put it in his mouth, lit it around a grin. “Good God, no,” he said. “On Albini.”

•   •   •

After he called the cab, Ted took Bobby over to the bar and ordered them both rootbeers.
He doesn't know I don't really like rootbeer
, Bobby thought. It seemed another piece in the puzzle, somehow—the puzzle of Ted. Len served them himself, saying nothing about how Bobby shouldn't be sitting at the bar, he was a nice kid but just stinking the place up with his under-twenty-oneness; apparently a free phone call wasn't all you got when you bet five hundred dollars on a prizefight.
And not even the excitement of the bet could long distract Bobby from a certain dull certainty which stole much of his pleasure in hearing that his father hadn't been such a bad guy, after all. The bet had been made to earn some runout money. Ted was leaving.

•   •   •

The taxi was a Checker with a huge back seat. The driver was deeply involved in the Yankees game on the radio, to the point where he sometimes talked back to the announcers.

“Files and his sister knew your father, didn't they?” It wasn't really a question.

“Yeah. Alanna especially. She thought he was a real nice guy.” Bobby paused. “But that's not what my mother thinks.”

“I imagine your mother saw a side of him Alanna Files never did,” Ted replied. “More than one. People are like diamonds in that way, Bobby. They have many sides.”

“But Mom said  . . .” It was too complicated. She'd never exactly said
anything
, really, only sort of suggested stuff. He didn't know how to tell Ted that his mother had sides, too, and some of them made it hard to believe those things she never quite came out and said. And when you got right down to it, how much did he really want to know? His father was dead, after all. His mother wasn't, and he had to live with her . . . and he had to love her. He had no one else to love, not even Ted. Because—

“When you going?” Bobby asked in a low voice.

“After your mother gets back.” Ted sighed, glanced out the window, then looked down at his hands, which were folded on one crossed knee. He didn't look at
Bobby, not yet. “Probably Friday morning. I can't collect my money until tomorrow night. I got four to one on Albini; that's two grand. My good pal Lennie will have to phone New York to make the cover.”

They crossed a canal bridge, and down there was back there. Now they were in the part of the city Bobby had travelled with his mother. The men on the street wore coats and ties. The women wore hose instead of bobbysocks. None of them looked like Alanna Files, and Bobby didn't think many of them would smell of liquor if they went “Shhh,” either. Not at four o'clock in the afternoon.

“I know why you didn't bet on Patterson–Johansson,” Bobby said. “It's because you don't know who'll win.”

“I
think
Patterson will this time,” Ted said, “because this time he's prepared for Johansson. I might flutter two dollars on Floyd Patterson, but five hundred? To bet five hundred you must either know or be crazy.”

“The Albini–Haywood fight is fixed, isn't it?”

Ted nodded. “I knew when you read that Kleindienst was involved, and I guessed that Albini was supposed to win.”

“You've made other bets on boxing matches where Mr. Kleindienst was a manager.”

Ted said nothing for a moment, only looked out the window. On the radio, someone hit a comebacker to Whitey Ford. Ford fielded the ball and threw to Moose Skowron at first. Now there were two down in the top of the eighth. At last Ted said, “It
could
have been Haywood. It wasn't likely, but it could have been. Then . . . did you see the old man back there? The one in the shoeshine chair?”

“Sure, you patted him on the cheeks.”

“That's Arthur Girardi. Files lets him hang around because he used to be connected. That's what Files thinks—
used
to be. Now he's just some old fellow who comes in to get his shoes shined at ten and then forgets and comes in to get them shined again at three. Files thinks he's just an old fellow who don't know from nothing, as they say. Girardi lets him think whatever he wants to think. If Files said the moon was green cheese, Girardi wouldn't say boo. Old Gee, he comes in for the air conditioning. And he's still connected.”

“Connected to Jimmy Gee.”

“To all sorts of guys.”

“Mr. Files didn't know the fight was fixed?”

“No, not for sure. I thought he would.”

“But old Gee knew. And he knew which one's supposed to take the dive.”

“Yes. That was my luck. Hurricane Haywood goes down in the eighth round. Then, next year when the odds are better, the Hurricane gets his payday.”

“Would you have bet if Mr. Girardi hadn't been there?”

“No,” Ted replied immediately.

“Then what would you have done for money? When you go away?”

Ted looked depressed at those words—
When you go away
. He made as if to put an arm around Bobby's shoulders, then stopped himself.

“There's always someone who knows something,” he said.

They were on Asher Avenue now, still in Bridgeport but only a mile or so from the Harwich town line.
Knowing what would happen, Bobby reached for Ted's big, nicotine-stained hand.

Ted swivelled his knees toward the door, taking his hands with them. “Better not.”

Bobby didn't need to ask why. People put up signs that said
WET PAINT DO NOT TOUCH
because if you put your hand on something newly painted, the stuff would get on your skin. You could wash it off, or it would wear off by itself in time, but for awhile it would be there.

“Where will you go?”

“I don't know.”

“I feel bad,” Bobby said. He could feel tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. “If something happens to you, it's my fault. I saw things, the things you told me to look out for, but I didn't say anything. I didn't want you to go. So I told myself you were crazy—not about everything, just about the low men you thought were chasing you—and I didn't say anything. You gave me a job and I muffed it.”

Ted's arm rose again. He lowered it and settled for giving Bobby a quick pat on the leg instead. At Yankee Stadium Tony Kubek had just doubled home two runs. The crowd was going wild.

“But I knew,” Ted said mildly.

Bobby stared at him. “What? I don't get you.”

“I felt them getting closer. That's why my trances have grown so frequent. Yet I lied to myself, just as you did. For the same reasons, too. Do you think I want to leave you now, Bobby? When your mother is so confused and unhappy? In all honesty I don't care so much for her sake, we don't get along, from the first second we laid eyes on each other we didn't get along, but she is your mother, and—”

“What's wrong with her?” Bobby asked. He remembered to keep his voice low, but he took Ted's arm and shook it. “Tell me! You know, I know you do! Is it Mr. Biderman? Is it something about Mr. Biderman?”

Ted looked out the window, brow furrowed, lips drawn down tightly. At last he sighed, pulled out his cigarettes, and lit one. “Bobby,” he said, “Mr. Biderman is not a nice man. Your mother knows it, but she also knows that sometimes we have to go along with people who are not nice. Go along to get along, she thinks, and she has done this. She's done things over the last year that she's not proud of, but she has been careful. In some ways she has needed to be as careful as I have, and whether I like her or not, I admire her for that.”

“What did she do? What did he make her do?” Something cold moved in Bobby's chest. “Why did Mr. Biderman take her to Providence?”

“For the real-estate conference.”

“Is that all? Is that
all?
”

“I don't know.
She
didn't know. Or perhaps she has covered over what she knows and what she fears with what she hopes. I can't say. Sometimes I can—sometimes I know things very directly and clearly. The first moment I saw you I knew that you wanted a bicycle, that getting one was very important to you, and you meant to earn the money for one this summer if you could. I admired your determination.”

“You touched me on purpose, didn't you?”

“Yes indeed. The first time, anyway. I did it to know you a little. But friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too. Besides, when I touch, I pass on a kind of—well, a kind of window. I think you know that. The second time I touched you . . . really
touching, holding on, you know what I mean . . . that was a mistake, but not such an awful one; for a little while you knew more than you should, but it wore off, didn't it? If I'd gone on, though . . . touching and touching, the way people do when they're close . . . there'd come a point where things would change. Where it wouldn't wear off.” He raised his mostly smoked cigarette and looked at it distastefully. “The way you smoke one too many of these and you're hooked for life.”

“Is my mother all right now?” Bobby asked, knowing that Ted couldn't tell him that; Ted's gift, whatever it was, didn't stretch that far.

“I don't know. I—”

Ted suddenly stiffened. He was looking out the window at something up ahead. He smashed his cigarette into the armrest ashtray, doing it hard enough to send sparks scattering across the back of his hand. He didn't seem to feel them. “Christ,” he said. “Oh Christ, Bobby, we're in for it.”

Bobby leaned across his lap to look out the window, thinking in the back of his mind about what Ted had just been saying—
touching and touching, the way people do when they're close
—even as he peered up Asher Avenue.

Ahead was a three-way intersection, Asher Avenue, Bridgeport Avenue, and the Connecticut Pike all coming together at a place known as Puritan Square. Trolley-tracks gleamed in the afternoon sun; delivery trucks honked impatiently as they waited their turns to dart through the crush. A sweating policeman with a whistle in his mouth and white gloves on his hands was directing traffic. Off to the left was the William
Penn Grille, a famous restaurant which was supposed to have the best steaks in Connecticut (Mr. Biderman had taken the whole office staff there after the agency sold the Waverley Estate, and Bobby's mom had come home with about a dozen William Penn Grille books of matches). Its main claim to fame, his mom had once told Bobby, was that the bar was over the Harwich town line, but the restaurant proper was in Bridgeport.

Parked in front, on the very edge of Puritan Square, was a DeSoto automobile of a purple Bobby had never seen before—had never even
suspected
. The color was so bright it hurt his eyes to look at it. It hurt his whole
head
.

Their cars will be like their yellow coats and sharp shoes and the greasy perfumed stuff they use to slick back their hair: loud and vulgar
.

The purple car was loaded with swoops and darts of chrome. It had fenderskirts. The hood ornament was huge; Chief DeSoto's head glittered in the hazy light like a fake jewel. The tires were fat whitewalls and the hubcaps were spinners. There was a whip antenna on the back. From its tip there hung a raccoon tail.

“The low men,” Bobby whispered. There was really no question. It was a DeSoto, but at the same time it was like no car he had ever seen in his life, something as alien as an asteroid. As they drew closer to the clogged three-way intersection, Bobby saw the upholstery was a metallic dragonfly-green—the color nearly howled in contrast to the car's purple skin. There was white fur around the steering wheel. “Holy crow, it's them!”

“You have to take your mind away,” Ted said. He grabbed Bobby by the shoulders (up front the Yankees blared on and on, the driver paying his two fares in the back seat no attention whatsoever, thank God for that much, at least) and shook him once, hard, before letting him go. “You have to take your mind
away
, do you understand?”