Hearts In Atlantis (23 page)

They were silent, not even muttering now. They only shuffled their feet.

“I'm sure you weren't, because that would be a cowardly thing to do, now wouldn't it?”

Again she gave them a chance to reply and plenty of time to hear their own silence.

“Willie? Richie? Harry? You weren't picking on them, were you?”

“Course not,” Harry said. Bobby thought that if he spun that ring of his much faster, his finger would probably catch fire.

“If I thought a thing like that,” Rionda said, still smiling her dangerous smile, “I'd have to go talk to Father Fitzgerald, wouldn't I? And the Father, he'd probably feel he had to talk to your folks, and
your
fathers'd probably feel obliged to warm your asses for you . . . and you'd deserve it, boys, wouldn't you? For picking on the weak and small.”

Continued silence from the three boys, all now astride their ridiculously undersized bikes again.

“Did they pick on you, Bobby?” Rionda asked.

“No,” Bobby said at once.

Rionda put a finger under Carol's chin and turned her face up. “Did they pick on
you
, lovey?”

“No, Rionda.”

Rionda smiled down at her, and although there were tears standing in Carol's eyes, she smiled back.

“Well, boys, I guess you're off the hook,” Rionda said. “They say you haven't done nothing that'll cause you a single extra uncomfy minute in the confessional. I'd say that you owe them a vote of thanks, don't you?”

Mutter-mutter-mutter from the St. Gabe's boys.
Please let it go at that
, Bobby pleaded silently.
Don't make them actually thank us. Don't rub their noses in it
.

Perhaps Rionda heard his thought (Bobby now had good reason to believe such things were possible). “Well,” she said, “maybe we can skip that part. Get along home, boys. And Harry, when you see Moira Dedham, tell her Rionda says she still goes to the Bingo over in Bridgeport every week, if she ever wants a ride.”

“I will, sure,” Harry said. He mounted his bike and rode away up the hill, eyes still on the sidewalk. Had
there been pedestrians coming the other way, he would likely have run them over. His two friends followed him, standing on their pedals to catch up.

Rionda watched them go, her smile slowly fading. “Shanty Irish,” she said at last, “just trouble waiting to happen. Bah, good riddance to em. Carol, are you really all right?”

Carol said she really was.

“Bobby?”

“Sure, I'm fine.” It was taking him all the discipline he could manage not to start shaking right in front of her like a bowl of cranberry jelly, but if Carol could keep from falling apart, he guessed he could.

“Get in the car,” Rionda said to Carol. “I'll give you a lift up to your house. You move along yourself, Bobby—scoot across the street and go inside. Those boys will have forgotten all about you and my Carol-girl by tomorrow, but tonight it might be smart for both of you to stay inside.”

“Okay,” Bobby said, knowing they wouldn't have forgotten by tomorrow, nor by the end of the week, nor by the end of the summer. He and Carol were going to have to watch out for Harry and his friends for a long time. “Bye, Carol.”

“Bye.”

Bobby trotted across Broad Street. On the other side he stood watching Rionda's old car go up to the apartment house where the Gerbers lived. When Carol got out she looked back down the hill and waved. Bobby waved back, then walked up the porch steps of 149 and went inside.

Ted was sitting in the living room, smoking a cigarette and reading
Life
magazine. Anita Ekberg was on
the cover. Bobby had no doubt that Ted's suitcases and the paper bags were packed, but there was no sign of them; he must have left them upstairs in his room. Bobby was glad. He didn't want to look at them. It was bad enough just knowing they were there.

“What did you do?” Ted asked.

“Not much,” Bobby said. “I think I'll lie down on my bed and read until supper.”

He went into his room. Stacked on the floor by his bed were three books from the adult section of the Harwich Public Library—
Cosmic Engineers
, by Clifford D. Simak;
The Roman Hat Mystery
, by Ellery Queen; and
The Inheritors
, by William Golding. Bobby chose
The Inheritors
and lay down with his head at the foot of his bed and his stocking feet on his pillow. There were cave people on the book's cover, but they were drawn in a way that was almost abstract—you'd never see cave people like that on the cover of a kids' book. Having an adult library card was very neat . . . but somehow not as neat as it had seemed at first.

•   •   •

Hawaiian Eye
was on at nine o'clock, and Bobby ordinarily would have been mesmerized (his mother claimed that shows like
Hawaiian Eye
and
The Untouchables
were too violent for children and ordinarily would not let him watch them), but tonight his mind kept wandering from the story. Less than sixty miles from here Eddie Albini and Hurricane Haywood would be mixing it up; the Gillette Blue Blades Girl, dressed in a blue bathing suit and blue high heels, would be parading around the ring before the start of every round and holding up a sign with a blue number on it. 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4  . . .

By nine-thirty Bobby couldn't have picked out the private eye on the TV show, let alone guessed who had murdered the blond socialite.
Hurricane Haywood goes down in the eighth round
, Ted had told him; Old Gee knew it. But what if something went wrong? He didn't want Ted to go, but if he had to, Bobby couldn't bear the thought of him going with an empty wallet. Surely that couldn't happen, though . . . or could it? Bobby had seen a TV show where a fighter was supposed to take a dive and then changed his mind. What if that happened tonight? Taking a dive was bad, it was cheating—no shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue?—but if Hurricane Haywood
didn't
cheat, Ted would be in a lot of trouble; “hurtin for certain” was how Sully-John would have put it.

Nine-thirty according to the sunburst clock on the living-room wall. If Bobby's math was right, the crucial eighth round was now underway.

“How do you like
The Inheritors
?”

Bobby was so deep into his own thoughts that Ted's voice made him jump. On TV, Keenan Wynn was standing in front of a bulldozer and saying he'd walk a mile for a Camel.

“It's a lot harder than
Lord of the Flies
,” he said. “It seems like there are these two little families of cave people wandering around, and one family is smarter. But the other family, the dumb family, they're the heroes. I almost gave up, but now it's getting more interesting. I guess I'll stick with it.”

“The family you meet first, the one with the little girl, they're Neanderthals. The second family—only that one's really a tribe, Golding and his tribes—are Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons are the inheritors.
What happens between the two groups satisfies the definition of tragedy: events tending toward an unhappy outcome which cannot be avoided.”

Ted went on, talking about plays by Shakespeare and poems by Poe and novels by a guy named Theodore Dreiser. Ordinarily Bobby would have been interested, but tonight his mind kept going to Madison Square Garden. He could see the ring, lit as savagely as the few working pool-tables in The Corner Pocket had been. He could hear the crowd screaming as Haywood poured it on, smacking the surprised Eddie Albini with lefts and rights. Haywood wasn't going to tank the fight; like the boxer in the TV show, he was going to show the other guy a serious world of hurt instead. Bobby could smell sweat and hear the heavy biff and baff of gloves on flesh. Eddie Albini's eyes came up double zeros . . . his knees buckled . . . the crowd was on its feet, screaming  . . .

“—the idea of fate as a force which can't be escaped seems to start with the Greeks. There was a playwright named Euripides who—”

“Call,” Bobby said, and although he'd never had a cigarette in his life (by 1964 he would be smoking over a carton a week), his voice sounded as harsh as Ted's did late at night, after a day's worth of Chesterfields.

“Beg your pardon, Bobby?”

“Call Mr. Files and see about the fight.” Bobby looked at the sunburst clock. Nine-forty-nine. “If it only went eight, it'll be over now.”

“I agree that the fight is over, but if I call Files so soon he may suspect I knew something,” Ted said. “Not
from the radio, either—this one isn't on the radio, as we both know. It's better to wait. Safer. Let him believe I am a man of inspired hunches. I'll call at ten, as if I expected the result to be a decision instead of a knockout. And in the meantime, Bobby, don't worry. I tell you it's a stroll on the boardwalk.”

Bobby gave up trying to follow
Hawaiian Eye
at all; he just sat on the couch and listened to the actors quack. A man shouted at a fat Hawaiian cop. A woman in a white bathing suit ran into the surf. One car chased another while drums throbbed on the soundtrack. The hands on the sunburst clock crawled, struggling toward the ten and the twelve like climbers negotiating the last few hundred feet of Mount Everest. The man who'd murdered the socialite was killed himself as he ran around in a pineapple field and
Hawaiian Eye
finally ended.

Bobby didn't wait for the previews of next week's show; he snapped off the TV and said, “Call, okay?
Please
call.”

“In a moment,” Ted said. “I think I went one rootbeer over my limit. My holding-tanks seem to have shrunk with age.”

He shuffled into the bathroom. There was an interminable pause, and then the sound of pee splashing into the bowl. “Aaah!” Ted said. There was considerable satisfaction in his voice.

Bobby could no longer sit. He got up and began pacing around the living room. He was sure that Tommy “Hurricane” Haywood was right now being photographed in his corner at The Garden, bruised but beaming as the flashbulbs splashed white light over his face. The Gillette Blue Blades Girl would be
there with him, her arm around his shoulders, his hand around her waist as Eddie Albini slumped forgotten in his own corner, dazed eyes puffed almost shut, still not completely conscious from the pounding he had taken.

By the time Ted returned, Bobby was in despair. He
knew
that Albini had lost the fight and his friend had lost his five hundred dollars. Would Ted stay when he found out he was broke? He might . . . but if he did and the low men came  . . .

Bobby watched, fists clenching and unclenching, as Ted picked up the telephone and dialed.

“Relax, Bobby,” Ted told him. “It's going to be okay.”

But Bobby couldn't relax. His guts felt full of wires. Ted held the phone to his ear without saying anything for what seemed like forever.

“Why don't they
answer?
” Bobby whispered fiercely.

“It's only rung twice, Bobby. Why don't you—hello? This is Mr. Brautigan calling. Ted Brautigan? Yes, ma'am, from this afternoon.” Incredibly, Ted tipped Bobby a wink. How could he be so cool? Bobby didn't think he himself would have been capable of holding the phone up to his ear if he'd been in Ted's position, let alone winking. “Yes, ma'am, he is.” Ted turned to Bobby and said, without covering the mouthpiece of the phone, “Alanna wants to know how is your girlfriend.”

Bobby tried to speak and could only wheeze.

“Bobby says she's fine,” Ted told Alanna, “pretty as a summer day. May I speak to Len? Yes, I can wait. But please tell me about the fight.” There was a pause which seemed to go on forever. Ted was expressionless now. And this time when he turned to Bobby he covered
the mouthpiece. “She says Albini got knocked around pretty good in the first five, held his own in six and seven, then threw a right hook out of nowhere and put Haywood on the canvas in the eighth. Lights out for the Hurricane. What a surprise, eh?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. His lips felt numb. It was true, all of it. By this time Friday night Ted would be gone. With two thousand rocks in your pocket you could do a lot of running from a lot of low men; with two thousand rocks in your pocket you could ride the Big Gray Dog from sea to shining sea.

Bobby went into the bathroom and squirted Ipana on his toothbrush. His terror that Ted had bet on the wrong fighter was gone, but the sadness of approaching loss was still there, and still growing. He never would have guessed that something that hadn't even happened could hurt so much.
A week from now I won't remember what was so neat about him. A year from now I'll hardly remember him at all
.

Was that true? God, was that true?

No
, Bobby thought.
No way. I won't let it be
.

In the other room Ted was conversing with Len Files. It seemed to be a friendly enough palaver, going just as Ted had expected it would . . . and yes, here was Ted saying he'd just played a hunch, a good strong one, the kind you had to bet if you wanted to think of yourself as a sport. Sure, nine-thirty tomorrow night would be fine for the payout, assuming his friend's mother was back by eight; if she was a little late, Len would see him around ten or ten-thirty. Did that suit? More laughter from Ted, so it seemed that it suited fat Lennie Files right down to the ground.

Bobby put his toothbrush back in the glass on the shelf below the mirror, then reached into his pants pocket. There was something in there his fingers didn't recognize, not a part of the usual pocket-litter. He pulled out the keyring with the green fob, his special souvenir of a part of Bridgeport his mother knew nothing about. The part that was down there.
THE CORNER POCKET BILLIARDS, POOL, AUTO. GAMES. KENMORE
8-2127.