Hearts In Atlantis (24 page)

He probably should have hidden it already (or gotten rid of it entirely), and suddenly an idea came to him. Nothing could have really cheered Bobby Garfield up that night, but this at least came close: he would give the keyring to Carol Gerber, after cautioning her never to tell his mom where she'd gotten it. He knew that Carol had at least two keys she could put on it—her apartment key and the key to the diary Rionda had given her for her birthday. (Carol was three months older than Bobby, but she never lorded it over him on this account.) Giving her the keyring would be a little like asking her to go steady. He wouldn't have to get all gushy and embarrass himself by saying so, either; Carol would know. It was part of what made her cool.

Bobby laid the keyring on the shelf, next to the toothglass, then went into his bedroom to put on his pj's. When he came out, Ted was sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette and looking at him.

“Bobby, are you all right?”

“I guess so. I guess I have to be, don't I?”

Ted nodded. “I guess we both have to be.”

“Will I ever see you again?” Bobby asked, pleading in his mind for Ted not to sound like the Lone Ranger,
not to start talking any of that corny
we'll meet again pard
stuff . . . because it wasn't
stuff
, that word was too kind. Shit was what it was. He didn't think Ted had ever lied to him, and he didn't want him to start now that they were near the end.

“I don't know.” Ted studied the coal of his cigarette, and when he looked up, Bobby saw that his eyes were swimming with tears. “I don't think so.”

Those tears undid Bobby. He ran across the room, wanting to hug Ted,
needing
to hug him. He stopped when Ted lifted his arms and crossed them over the chest of his baggy old man's shirt, his expression a kind of horrified surprise.

Bobby stood where he was, his arms still held out to hug. Slowly he lowered them. No hugging, no touching. It was the rule, but the rule was mean. The rule was wrong.

“Will you write?” he asked.

“I will send you postcards,” Ted replied after a moment's thought. “Not directly to you, though—that might be dangerous for both of us. What shall I do? Any ideas?”

“Send them to Carol,” Bobby said. He didn't even stop to think.

“When did you tell her about the low men, Bobby?” There was no reproach in Ted's voice. Why would there be? He was going, wasn't he? For all the difference it made, the guy who did the story on the shopping-cart thief could write it up for the paper:
CRAZY OLD MAN RUNS FROM INVADING ALIENS.
People would read it to each other over their coffee and breakfast cereal and laugh. What had Ted called it that day? Galumphing small-town humor, hadn't
that been it? But if it was so funny, why did it hurt? Why did it hurt so much?

“Today,” he said in a small voice. “I saw her in the park and everything just kind of . . . came out.”

“That can happen,” Ted said gravely. “I know it well; sometimes the dam just bursts. And perhaps it's for the best. You'll tell her I may want to get in touch with you through her?”

“Yeah.”

Ted tapped a finger against his lips, thinking. Then he nodded. “At the top, the cards I send will say
Dear C
. instead of
Dear Carol
. At the bottom I'll sign
A Friend
. That way you'll both know who writes. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Cool.” It wasn't cool, none of this was cool, but it would do.

He suddenly lifted his hand, kissed the fingers, and blew across them. Ted, sitting on the couch, smiled, caught the kiss, and put it on his lined cheek. “You better go to bed now, Bobby. It's been a big day and it's late.”

Bobby went to bed.

•   •   •

At first he thought it was the same dream as before—Biderman, Cushman, and Dean chasing his mom through the jungle of William Golding's island. Then Bobby realized the trees and vines were part of the wallpaper, and that the path under his mother's flying feet was brown carpet. Not a jungle but a hotel corridor. This was his mind's version of the Warwick Hotel.

Mr. Biderman and the other two nimrods were still chasing her, though. And now so were the boys from St. Gabe's—Willie and Richie and Harry Doolin. All
of them were wearing those streaks of red and white paint on their faces. And all of them were wearing bright yellow doublets upon which was drawn a brilliant red eye:

Other than the doublets they were naked. Their privates flopped and bobbed in bushy nests of pubic hair. All save Harry Doolin brandished spears; he had his baseball bat. It had been sharpened to a point on both ends.

“Kill the bitch!” Cushman yelled.

“Drink her blood!” Don Biderman cried, and threw his spear at Liz Garfield just as she darted around a corner. The spear stuck, quivering, into one of the jungle-painted walls.

“Stick it up her dirty cunt!” cried Willie—Willie who could be nice when he wasn't with his friends. The red eye on his chest stared. Below it, his penis also seemed to stare.

Run, Mom!
Bobby tried to scream, but no words came out. He had no mouth, no body. He was here and yet he wasn't. He flew beside his mother like her own shadow. He heard her gasping for breath, saw her trembling, terrified mouth and her torn stockings. Her fancy dress was also torn. One of her breasts was scratched and bleeding. One of her eyes was almost closed. She looked as if she had gone a few rounds with Eddie Albini or Hurricane Haywood . . . maybe both at the same time.

“Gonna split you open!” Richie hollered.

“Eat you alive!” agreed Curtis Dean (and at top volume). “Drink your blood, strew your guts!”

His mom looked back at them and her feet (she had lost her shoes somewhere) stuttered against each other.
Don't do that, Mom
, Bobby moaned.
For cripe's sake don't do that
.

As if she had heard him, Liz faced forward again and tried to run faster. She passed a poster on the wall:

PLEASE HELP US FIND OUR PET PIG?

LIZ
is our
MASCOT!

LIZ IS 34 YRS. OLD!

She is a
BAD-TEMPERED SOW
but
WE LOVE HER!

Will do what you want if you say “
I PROMISE
”

(
OR
)

“THERE'S MONEY IN IT”!

CALL HO
usitonic 5-8337

(
OR
)

BRING
to
THE WILLIAM PENN GRILLE!

Ask for
THE LOW MEN IN THE YELLOW COATS!

Motto: “
WE EAT IT
RARE
!
”

His mom saw the poster, too, and this time when her ankles banged together she
did
fall.

Get up, Mom!
Bobby screamed, but she didn't—perhaps couldn't. She crawled along the brown carpet instead, looking over her shoulder as she went, her hair hanging across her cheeks and forehead in sweaty clumps. The back of her dress had been torn away, and Bobby could see her bare bum—her underpants were gone. Worse, the backs of her thighs were
splashed with blood. What had they done to her? Dear God, what had they done to his mother?

Don Biderman came around the corner
ahead
of her—he had found a shortcut and cut her off. The others were right behind him. Now Mr. Biderman's prick was standing straight up the way Bobby's sometimes did in the morning before he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Only Mr. Biderman's prick was
huge
, it looked like a kraken, a triffid, a
monstah
, and Bobby thought he understood the blood on his mother's legs. He didn't want to but he thought he did.

Leave her alone!
he tried to scream at Mr. Biderman.
Leave her alone, haven't you done enough?

The scarlet eye on Mr. Biderman's yellow doublet suddenly opened wider . . . and slithered to one side. Bobby was invisible, his body one world farther down the spinning top from this one . . . but the red eye saw him. The red eye saw
everything
.

“Kill the pig, drink her blood,” Mr. Biderman said in a thick, almost unrecognizable voice, and started forward.

“Kill the pig, drink her blood,” Bill Cushman and Curtis Dean chimed in.

“Kill the pig, strew her guts, eat her flesh,” chanted Willie and Richie, falling in behind the nimrods. Like those of the men, their pricks had turned into spears.

“Eat her, drink her, strew her,
screw
her,” Harry chimed in.

Get up, Mom! Run! Don't let them!

She tried. But even as she struggled from her knees to her feet, Biderman leaped at her. The others followed, closing in, and as their hands began to tear the
tatters of her clothes from her body Bobby thought:
I want to get out of here, I want to go back down the top to my own world, make it stop and spin it the other way so I can go back down to my own room in my own world  . . .

Except it wasn't a top, and even as the images of the dream began to break up and go dark, Bobby knew it. It wasn't a top but a tower, a still spindle upon which all of existence moved and spun. Then it was gone and for a little while there was a merciful nothingness. When he opened his eyes, his bedroom was full of sunshine—summer sunshine on a Thursday morning in the last June of the Eisenhower Presidency.

One thing you could say about Ted Brautigan: he knew how to cook. The breakfast he slid in front of Bobby—lightly scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon—was a lot better than anything his mother ever made for breakfast (her specialty was huge, tasteless pancakes which the two of them drowned in Aunt Jemima's syrup), and as good as anything you could get at the Colony Diner or the Harwich. The only problem was that Bobby didn't feel like eating. He couldn't remember the details of his dream, but he knew it had been a nightmare, and that he must have cried at some point while it was going on—when he woke up, his pillow had been damp. Yet the dream wasn't the only reason he felt flat and depressed this morning; dreams, after all, weren't real. Ted's going away would be real. And would be forever.

“Are you leaving right from The Corner Pocket?” Bobby asked as Ted sat down across from him with his own plate of eggs and bacon. “You are, aren't you?”

“Yes, that will be safest.” He began to eat, but slowly and with no apparent enjoyment. So he was feeling bad, too. Bobby was glad. “I'll say to your mother that my brother in Illinois is ill. That's all she needs to know.”

“Are you going to take the Big Gray Dog?”

Ted smiled briefly. “Probably the train. I'm quite the wealthy man, remember.”

“Which train?”

“It's better if you don't know the details, Bobby. What you don't know you can't tell. Or be made to tell.”

Bobby considered this briefly, then asked, “You'll remember the postcards?”

Ted picked up a piece of bacon, then put it down again. “Postcards, plenty of postcards. I promise. Now don't let's talk about it anymore.”

“What should we talk about, then?”

Ted thought about it, then smiled. His smile was sweet and open; when he smiled, Bobby could see what he must have looked like when he was twenty, and strong.

“Books, of course,” Ted said. “We'll talk about books.”

•   •   •

It was going to be a crushingly hot day, that was clear by nine o'clock. Bobby helped with the dishes, drying and putting away, and then they sat in the living room, where Ted's fan did its best to circulate the already tired air, and they talked about books . . . or
rather
Ted
talked about books. And this morning, without the distraction of the Albini–Haywood fight, Bobby listened hungrily. He didn't understand all of what Ted was saying, but he understood enough to realize that books made their own world, and that the Harwich Public Library wasn't it. The library was nothing but the doorway to that world.

Ted talked of William Golding and what he called “dystopian fantasy,” went on to H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
, suggesting a link between the Morlocks and the Eloi and Jack and Ralph on Golding's island; he talked about what he called “literature's only excuses,” which he said were exploring the questions of innocence and experience, good and evil. Near the end of this impromptu lecture he mentioned a novel called
The Exorcist
, which dealt with both these questions (“in the popular context”), and then stopped abruptly. He shook his head as if to clear it.

“What's wrong?” Bobby took a sip of his rootbeer. He still didn't like it much but it was the only soft drink in the fridge. Besides, it was cold.

“What am I thinking?” Ted passed a hand over his brow, as if he'd suddenly developed a headache. “That one hasn't been written yet.”