Hearts In Atlantis (26 page)

They stepped onto the sidewalk and Bobby was about to ask if she could make it across the street when Carol said in a high, whispery voice: “Oh Bobby I'm fainting.”

He looked at her in alarm and saw her eyes roll up to glistening whites. She swayed back and forth like a tree which has been cut almost all the way through.
Bobby bent, moving without thinking, catching her around the thighs and the back as her knees unlocked. He had been standing to her right and was able to do this without hurting her left arm any more than it already had been hurt; also, even in her faint, Carol kept her right hand cupped over her left elbow, holding the arm mostly steady.

Carol Gerber was Bobby's height, perhaps even a little taller, and close to his weight. He should have been incapable of even staggering up Broad Street with her in his arms, but people in shock are capable of amazing bursts of strength. Bobby carried her, and not at a stagger; under that burning June sun he ran. No one stopped him, no one asked him what was wrong with the little girl, no one offered to help. He could hear cars on Asher Avenue, but this part of the world seemed eerily like Midwich, where everyone had gone to sleep at once.

Taking Carol to her mother never crossed his mind. The Gerber apartment was farther up the hill, but that wasn't the reason. Ted was all Bobby could think of. He had to take her to Ted. Ted would know what to do.

His preternatural strength began to give out as he climbed the steps to the front porch of his building. He staggered, and Carol's grotesque double shoulder bumped against the railing. She stiffened in his arms and cried out, her half-lidded eyes opening wide.

“Almost there,” he told her in a panting whisper that didn't sound much like his own voice. “Almost there, I'm sorry I bumped you but we're almost—”

The door opened and Ted came out. He was wearing gray suit pants and a strap-style undershirt.
Suspenders hung down to his knees in swinging loops. He looked surprised and concerned but not frightened.

Bobby managed the last porch step and then swayed backward. For one terrible moment he thought he was going to go crashing down, maybe splitting his skull on the cement walk. Then Ted grabbed him and steadied him.

“Give her to me,” he said.

“Get over on her other side first,” Bobby panted. His arms were twanging like guitar strings and his shoulders seemed to be on fire. “That's the bad side.”

Ted came around and stood next to Bobby. Carol was looking up at them, her sandy-blond hair hanging down over Bobby's wrist. “They hurt me,” she whispered to Ted. “Willie . . . I asked him to make them stop but he wouldn't.”

“Don't talk,” Ted said. “You're going to be all right.”

He took her from Bobby as gently as he could, but they couldn't help joggling her left arm a little. The double shoulder moved under the white smock. Carol moaned, then began to cry. Fresh blood trickled from her right nostril, one brilliant red drop against her skin. Bobby had a momentary flash from his dream of the night before: the eye. The red eye.

“Hold the door for me, Bobby.”

Bobby held it wide. Ted carried Carol through the foyer and into the Garfield apartment. At that same moment Liz Garfield was descending the iron steps leading from the Harwich stop of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad to Main Street, where there was a taxi stand. She moved with the slow deliberation of a chronic invalid. A suitcase dangled
from each hand. Mr. Burton, proprietor of the newsstand kiosk, happened to be standing in his doorway and having a smoke. He watched Liz reach the bottom of the steps, turn back the veil of her little hat, and gingerly dab at her face with a bit of handkerchief. She winced at each touch. She was wearing makeup, a lot, but the makeup didn't help. The makeup only drew attention to what had happened to her. The veil was better, even though it only covered the upper part of her face, and now she lowered it again. She approached the first of three idling taxis, and the driver got out to help her with her bags.

Burton wondered who had given her the business. He hoped whoever it had been was currently getting his head massaged by big cops with hard hickories. A person who would do something like that to a woman deserved no better. A person who would do something like that to a woman had no business running around loose. That was Burton's opinion.

•   •   •

Bobby thought Ted would put Carol on the couch, but he didn't. There was one straight-backed chair in the living room and that was where he sat, holding her on his lap. He held her the way the Grant's department store Santa Claus held the little kids who came up to him as he sat on his throne.

“Where else are you hurt? Besides the shoulder?”

“They hit me in the stomach. And on my side.”

“Which side?”

“The right one.”

Ted gently pulled her blouse up on that side. Bobby hissed in air over his lower lip when he saw the bruise which lay diagonally across her ribcage. He
recognized the baseball-bat shape of it at once. He knew whose bat it had been: Harry Doolin's, the pimply galoot who saw himself as Robin Hood in whatever stunted landscape passed for his imagination. He and Richie O'Meara and Willie Shearman had come upon her in the park and Harry had worked her over with his ball-bat while Richie and Willie held her. All three of them laughing and calling her the Gerber Baby. Maybe it had started as a joke and gotten out of hand. Wasn't that pretty much what had happened in
Lord of the Flies
? Things had just gotten a little out of hand?

Ted touched Carol's waist; his bunchy fingers spread and then slowly slid up her side. He did this with his head cocked, as if he were listening rather than touching. Maybe he was. Carol gasped when he reached the bruise.

“Hurt?” Ted asked.

“A little. Not as bad as my sh-shoulder. They broke my arm, didn't they?”

“No, I don't think so,” Ted replied.

“I heard it pop. So did they. That's when they ran.”

“I'm sure you did hear it. Yes indeed.”

Tears were running down her cheeks and her face was still ashy, but Carol seemed calmer now. Ted held her blouse up against her armpit and looked at the bruise.
He knows what that shape is just as well as I do
, Bobby thought.

“How many were there, Carol?”

Three
, Bobby thought.

“Th-three.”

“Three boys?”

She nodded.

“Three boys against one little girl. They must have been afraid of you. They must have thought you were a lion. Are you a lion, Carol?”

“I wish I was,” Carol said. She tried to smile. “I wish I could have roared and made them go away. They h-h-
hurt
me.”

“I know they did. I know.” His hand slid down her side and cupped the bat-bruise on her ribcage. “Breathe in.”

The bruise swelled against Ted's hand; Bobby could see its purple shape between his nicotine-stained fingers. “Does
that
hurt?”

She shook her head.

“Not to breathe?”

“No.”

“And not when your ribs go against my hand?”

“No. Only sore. What hurts is  . . .” She glanced quickly at the terrible shape of her double shoulder, then away.

“I know. Poor Carol. Poor darling. We'll get to that. Where else did they hit you? In the stomach, you said?”

“Yes.”

Ted pulled her blouse up in front. There was another bruise, but this one didn't look so deep or so angry. He prodded gently with his fingers, first above her bellybutton and then below it. She said there was no pain like in her shoulder, that her belly was only sore like her ribs were sore.

“They didn't hit you in your back?”

“N-no.”

“In your head or your neck?”

“Uh-uh, just my side and my stomach and then
they hit me in the shoulder and there was that pop and they heard it and they ran. I used to think Willie Shearman was nice.” She gave Ted a woeful look.

“Turn your head for me, Carol . . . good . . . now the other way. It doesn't hurt when you turn it?”

“No.”

“And you're sure they never hit your head.”

“No. I mean yes, I'm sure.”

“Lucky girl.”

Bobby wondered how in the hell Ted could think Carol was
lucky
. Her left arm didn't look just broken to him; it looked half torn off. He suddenly thought of a roast-chicken Sunday dinner, and the sound the drumstick made when you pulled it loose. His stomach knotted. For a moment he thought he was going to vomit up his breakfast and the day-old bread which had been his only lunch.

No
, he told himself.
Not now, you can't. Ted's got enough problems without adding you to the list
.

“Bobby?” Ted's voice was clear and sharp. He sounded like a guy with more solutions than problems, and what a relief that was. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” And he thought it was true. His stomach was starting to settle.

“Good. You did well to get her up here. Can you do well a little longer?”

“Yeah.”

“I need a pair of scissors. Can you find one?”

Bobby went into his mother's bedroom, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and got out her wicker sewing basket. Inside was a medium-sized pair of shears. He hurried back into the living room with them and showed them to Ted. “Are these all right?”

“Fine,” he said, taking them. Then, to Carol: “I'm going to spoil your blouse, Carol. I'm sorry, but I have to look at your shoulder now and I don't want to hurt you any more than I can help.”

“That's okay,” she said, and again tried to smile. Bobby was a little in awe of her bravery; if
his
shoulder had looked like that, he probably would have been blatting like a sheep caught in a barbed-wire fence.

“You can wear one of Bobby's shirts home. Can't she, Bobby?”

“Sure, I don't mind a few cooties.”

“Fun-
nee
,” Carol said.

Working carefully, Ted cut the smock up the back and then up the front. With that done he pulled the two pieces off like the shell of an egg. He was very careful on the left side, but Carol uttered a hoarse scream when Ted's fingers brushed her shoulder. Bobby jumped and his heart, which had been slowing down, began to race again.

“I'm sorry,” Ted murmured. “Oh my. Look at this.”

Carol's shoulder was ugly, but not as bad as Bobby had feared—perhaps few things were once you were looking right at them. The second shoulder was higher than the normal one, and the skin there was stretched so tight that Bobby didn't understand why it didn't just split open. It had gone a peculiar lilac color, as well.

“How bad is it?” Carol asked. She was looking in the other direction, across the room. Her small face had the pinched, starved look of a
UNICEF
child. So far as Bobby knew she never looked at her hurt shoulder after that single quick peek. “I'll be in a cast all summer, won't I?”

“I don't think you're going to be in a cast at all.”

Carol looked up into Ted's face wonderingly.

“It's not broken, child, only dislocated. Someone hit you on the shoulder—”

“Harry Doolin—”

“—and hard enough to knock the top of the bone in your upper left arm out of its socket. I can put it back in, I think. Can you stand one or two moments of quite bad pain if you know things may be all right again afterward?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “Fix it, Mr. Brautigan. Please fix it.”

Bobby looked at him a little doubtfully. “Can you really do that?”

“Yes. Give me your belt.”

“
Huh?
”

“Your belt. Give it to me.”

Bobby slipped his belt—a fairly new one he'd gotten for Christmas—out of its loops and handed it to Ted, who took it without ever shifting his eyes from Carol's. “What's your last name, honey?”

“Gerber. They called me the Gerber Baby, but I'm not a baby.”

“I'm sure you're not. And this is where you prove it.” He got up, settled her in the chair, then knelt before her like a guy in some old movie getting ready to propose. He folded Bobby's belt over twice in his big hands, then poked it at her good hand until she let go of her elbow and closed her fingers over the loops. “Good. Now put it in your mouth.”

“Put Bobby's
belt
in my
mouth?
”

Ted's gaze never left her. He began stroking her unhurt arm from the elbow to the wrist. His fingers
trailed down her forearm . . . stopped . . . rose and went back to her elbow . . . trailed down her forearm again.
It's like he's hypnotizing her
, Bobby thought, but there was really no “like” about it; Ted
was
hypnotizing her. His pupils had begun to do that weird thing again, growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking. Their movement and the movement of his fingers were exactly in rhythm. Carol stared into his face, her lips parted.

“Ted . . . your
eyes
 . . .”

“Yes, yes.” He sounded impatient, not very interested in what his eyes were doing. “Pain rises, Carol, did you know that?”

“No  . . .”

Her eyes on his. His fingers on her arm, going down and rising. Going down . . . and rising. His pupils like a slow heartbeat. Bobby could see Carol relaxing in the chair. She was still holding the belt, and when Ted stopped his finger-stroking long enough to touch the back of her hand, she lifted it toward her face with no protest.

“Oh yes,” he said, “pain rises from its source to the brain. When I put your shoulder back in its socket, there will be a lot of pain—but you'll catch most of it in your mouth as it rises toward your brain. You will bite it with your teeth and hold it against Bobby's belt so that only a little of it can get into your head, which is where things hurt the most. Do you understand me, Carol?”