Hearts In Atlantis (21 page)

He did. George Sanders had built a brick wall behind which to hide his thoughts and plans from the Children. Bobby had used Maury Wills once before, but he didn't think baseball was going to cut it this time. What would?

Bobby could see the Asher Empire's marquee jutting out over the sidewalk, three or four blocks beyond Puritan Square, and suddenly he could hear the sound of Sully-John's Bo-lo Bouncer: whap-whap-whap.
If she's trash
, S-J had said,
I'd love to be the trashman
.

The poster they'd seen that day filled Bobby's mind: Brigitte Bardot (
the French sex-kitten
was what the papers called her) dressed only in a towel and a smile. She looked a little like the woman getting out of the car on one of the calendars back at The Corner Pocket, the one with most of her skirt in her lap and her garters showing. Brigitte Bardot was prettier, though. And she was
real
. She was too old for the likes of Bobby Garfield, of course

(
I'm so young and you're so old
, Paul Anka singing from a thousand transistor radios,
this my darling I've been told
)

but she was still beautiful, and a cat could look at a queen, his mother always said that, too: a cat could look at a queen. Bobby saw her more and more clearly
as he settled back against the seat, his eyes taking on that drifty, far-off look Ted's eyes got when he had one of his blank-outs; Bobby saw her shower-damp puff of blond hair, the slope of her breasts into the towel, her long thighs, her painted toenails standing over the words Adults Only, Must Have Driver's License or Birth Certificate. He could smell her soap—something light and flowery. He could smell

(
Nuit en Paris
)

her perfume and he could hear her radio in the next room. It was Freddy Cannon, that bebop summertime avatar of Savin Rock: “She's dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop, she's stompin to the shag,
rocks
the bunny hop  . . .”

He was aware—faintly, far away, in another world farther up along the swirls of the spinning top—that the cab in which they were riding had come to a stop right next to the William Penn Grille, right next to that purple bruise of a DeSoto. Bobby could almost hear the car in his head; if it had had a voice it would have screamed
Shoot me, I'm too purple! Shoot me, I'm too purple!
And not far beyond it he could sense
them
. They were in the restaurant, having an early steak. Both of them ate it the same way, bloody-rare. Before they left they might put up a lost-pet poster in the telephone lounge or a hand-printed
CAR FOR SALE BY OWNER
card: upside-down, of course. They were in there, low men in yellow coats and white shoes drinking martinis between bites of nearly raw steer, and if they turned their minds out this way  . . .

Steam was drifting out of the shower. B.B. raised herself on her bare painted toes and opened her towel, turning it into brief wings before letting it fall. And
Bobby saw it wasn't Brigitte Bardot at all. It was Carol Gerber.
You'd have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel
, she had said, and now she had let even the towel fall away. He was seeing her as she would look eight or ten years from now.

Bobby looked at her, helpless to look away, helpless in love, lost in the smells of her soap and her perfume, the sound of her radio (Freddy Cannon had given way to The Platters—
heavenly shades of night are falling
), the sight of her small painted toenails. His heart spun as a top did, with its lines rising and disappearing into other worlds. Other worlds than this.

The taxi began creeping forward. The four-door purple horror parked next to the restaurant (parked in a loading zone, Bobby saw, but what did
they
care?) began to slide to the rear. The cab jolted to a stop again and the driver cursed mildly as a trolley rushed clang-a-lang through Puritan Square. The low DeSoto was behind them now, but reflections from its chrome filled the cab with erratic dancing minnows of light. And suddenly Bobby felt a savage itching attack the backs of his eyeballs. This was followed by a fall of twisting black threads across his field of vision. He was able to hold onto Carol, but he now seemed to be looking at her through a field of interference.

They sense us . . . or they sense something. Please God, get us out of here. Please get us out
.

The cabbie saw a hole in the traffic and squirted through it. A moment later they were rolling up Asher Avenue at a good pace. That itching sensation behind Bobby's eyes began to recede. The black threads across his field of interior vision cleared away, and when they did he saw that the naked girl wasn't
Carol at all (not anymore, at least), not even Brigitte Bardot, but only the calendar-girl from The Corner Pocket, stripped mother-naked by Bobby's imagination. The music from her radio was gone. The smells of soap and perfume were gone. The life had gone out of her; she was just a . . . a  . . .

“She's just a picture painted on a brick wall,” Bobby said. He sat up.

“Say what, kid?” the driver asked, and snapped off the radio. The game was over. Mel Allen was selling cigarettes.

“Nothing,” Bobby said.

“Guess youse dozed off, huh? Slow traffic, hot day . . . they'll do it every time, just like Hatlo says. Looks like your pal's still out.”

“No,” Ted said, straightening. “The doctor is in.” He stretched his back and winced when it crackled. “I did doze a little, though.” He glanced out the back window, but the William Penn Grille was out of sight now. “The Yankees won, I suppose?”

“Gahdam Injuns, they roont em,” the cabbie said, and laughed. “Don't see how youse could sleep with the Yankees playing.”

They turned onto Broad Street; two minutes later the cab pulled up in front of 149. Bobby looked at it as if expecting to see a different color paint or perhaps an added wing. He felt like he'd been gone ten years. In a way he supposed he had been—hadn't he seen Carol Gerber all grown up?

I'm going to marry her
, Bobby decided as he got out of the cab. Over on Colony Street, Mrs. O'Hara's dog barked on and on, as if denying this and all human aspirations:
roop-roop, roop-roop-roop
.

Ted bent down to the driver's-side window with his wallet in his hand. He plucked out two singles, considered, then added a third. “Keep the change.”

“You're a gent,” the cabbie said.

“He's a
shooter
,” Bobby corrected, and grinned as the cab pulled away.

“Let's get inside,” Ted said. “It's not safe for me to be out here.”

They went up the porch steps and Bobby used his key to open the door to the foyer. He kept thinking about that weird itching behind his eyes, and the black threads. The threads had been particularly horrible, as if he'd been on the verge of going blind. “Did they see us, Ted? Or sense us, or whatever they do?”

“You know they did . . . but I don't think they knew how close we were.” As they went into the Garfield apartment, Ted took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “You must have covered up well. Whooo! Hot in here!”

“What makes you think they didn't know we were close?”

Ted paused in the act of opening a window, giving Bobby a level look back over his shoulder. “If they'd known, that purple car would have been right behind us when we pulled up here.”

“It wasn't a car,” Bobby said, beginning to open windows himself. It didn't help much; the air that came in, lifting the curtains in listless little flaps, felt almost as hot as the air which had been trapped inside the apartment all day. “I don't know what it was, but it only
looked
like a car. And what I felt of
them
—” Even in the heat, Bobby shivered.

Ted got his fan, crossed to the window by Liz's shelf
of knickknacks, and set it on the sill. “They camouflage themselves as best they can, but we still feel them. Even people who don't know what they are often feel them. A little of what's under the camouflage seeps through, and what's underneath is ugly. I hope you never know how ugly.”

Bobby hoped so, too. “Where do they come from, Ted?”

“A dark place.”

Ted knelt, plugged in his fan, flipped it on. The air it pulled into the room was a little cooler, but not so cool as The Corner Pocket had been, or the Criterion.

“Is it in another world, like in
Ring Around the Sun
? It is, isn't it?”

Ted was still on his knees by the electrical plug. He looked as if he were praying. To Bobby he also looked exhausted—done almost to death. How could he run from the low men? He didn't look as if he could make it as far as Spicer's Variety Store without stumbling.

“Yes,” he said at last. “They come from another world. Another where and another when. That's all I can tell you. It's not safe for you to know more.”

But Bobby had to ask one other question. “Did you come from one of those other worlds?”

Ted looked at him solemnly. “I came from Teaneck.”

Bobby gaped at him for a moment, then began to laugh. Ted, still kneeling by the fan, joined him.

“What did you think of in the cab, Bobby?” Ted asked when they were finally able to stop. “Where did you go when the trouble started?” He paused. “What did you see?”

Bobby thought of Carol at twenty with her toenails painted pink, Carol standing naked with the
towel at her feet and steam rising around her. Adults Only. Must Have Driver's License. No Exceptions.

“I can't tell,” he said at last. “Because . . . well  . . .”

“Because some things are private. I understand.” Ted got to his feet. Bobby stepped forward to help him but Ted waved him away. “Perhaps you'd like to go out and play for a little while,” he said. “Later on—around six, shall we say?—I'll put on my dark glasses again and we'll go around the block, have a bite of dinner at the Colony Diner.”

“But no beans.”

The corners of Ted's mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile. “Absolutely no beans, beans
verboten
. At ten o'clock I'll call my friend Len and see how the fight went. Eh?”

“The low men . . . will they be looking for me now, too?”

“I'd never let you step out the door if I thought that,” Ted replied, looking surprised. “You're fine, and I'm going to make sure you
stay
fine. Go on now. Play some catch or ring-a-levio or whatever it is you like. I have some things to do. Only be back by six so I don't worry.”

“Okay.”

Bobby went into his room and dumped the four quarters he'd taken to Bridgeport back into the Bike Fund jar. He looked around his room, seeing things with new eyes: the cowboy bedspread, the picture of his mother on one wall and the signed photo—obtained by saving cereal boxtops—of Clayton Moore in his mask on another, his roller skates (one with a broken strap) in the corner, his desk against the wall. The room looked smaller now—not so much a place to
come to as a place to leave. He realized he was growing into his orange library card, and some bitter voice inside cried out against it. Cried no, no, no.

In Commonwealth Park the little kids were playing ticky-ball. Field B was empty; on Field C a few teenagers in orange St. Gabriel's tee-shirts were playing scrub. Carol Gerber was sitting on a bench with her jump-rope in her lap, watching them. She saw Bobby coming and began to smile. Then the smile went away.

“Bobby, what's wrong with you?”

Bobby hadn't been precisely aware that
anything
was wrong with him until Carol said that, but the look of concern on her face brought everything home and undid him. It was the reality of the low men and the fright of the close call they'd had on their way back from Bridgeport; it was his concern over his mother; mostly it was Ted. He knew perfectly well why Ted had shooed him out of the house, and what Ted was doing right now: filling his little suitcases and those carryhandle paper bags. His friend was going away.

Bobby began to cry. He didn't want to go all ushy-gushy in front of a girl, particularly
this
girl, but he couldn't help it.

Carol looked stunned for a moment—scared. Then she got off the bench, came to him, and put her arms around him. “That's all right,” she said. “That's all right, Bobby, don't cry, everything's all right.”

Almost blinded by tears and crying harder than ever—it was as if there were a violent summer storm going on in his head—Bobby let her lead him into a copse of trees where they would be hidden from the baseball fields and the main paths. She sat down on the grass, still holding him, brushing one hand through the sweaty bristles of his crewcut. For a little while she said nothing at all, and Bobby was incapable of speaking; he could only sob until his throat ached and his eyeballs throbbed in their sockets.

At last the intervals between sobs became longer. He sat up and wiped his face with his arm, horrified and ashamed of what he felt: not just tears but snot and spit as well. He must have covered her with mung.

Carol didn't seem to care. She touched his wet face. Bobby pulled back from her fingers, uttering another sob, and looked down at the grass. His eyesight, freshly washed by his tears, seemed almost preternaturally keen; he could see every blade and dandelion.

“It's all right,” she said, but Bobby was still too ashamed to look at her.

They sat quietly for a little while and then Carol said, “Bobby, I'll be your girlfriend, if you want.”

“You
are
my girlfriend,” Bobby said.

“Then tell me what's wrong.”