Hearts In Atlantis (30 page)

He went to the ashtray, held it to his nose, and breathed in deeply. The smell of Chesterfields was strong, and it brought Ted back completely, Ted sitting here at his table and talking about
Lord of the Flies
, Ted standing at his bathroom mirror, shaving with that scary razor of his, listening through the open door as Bobby read him opinion pieces Bobby himself didn't understand.

Ted leaving one final question on the side of a paper bag: Guys like us. Who are guys like us?

Bobby breathed in again, sucking up little flakes of ash and fighting back the urge to sneeze, holding the smell in, fixing it in his memory as best he could, closing his eyes, and in through the window came the endless ineluctable cry of Bowser, now calling down the dark like a dream:
roop-roop-roop, roop-roop-roop
.

He put the ashtray down again. The urge to sneeze had passed.
I'm going to smoke Chesterfields
, he decided.
I'm going to smoke them all my life
.

He went back downstairs, holding the paperbacks in front of him and walking on the outside of the staircase again as he went from the second floor to the foyer. He slipped into the apartment, tiptoed across the living room (his mother was still snoring, louder than ever), and into his bedroom. He put the books under his bed—
deep
under. If his mom found them he
would say Mr. Burton had given them to him. That was a lie, but if he told the truth she'd take the books away. Besides, lying no longer seemed so bad. Lying might become a necessity. In time it might even become a pleasure.

What next? The rumble in his stomach decided him. A couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were next.

He started for the kitchen, tiptoeing past his mother's partly open bedroom door without even thinking about it, then paused. She was shifting around on her bed. Her snores had become ragged and she was talking in her sleep. It was a low, moaning talk Bobby couldn't make out, but he realized he didn't
have
to make it out. He could hear her anyway. And he could see stuff. Her thoughts? Her dreams? Whatever it was, it was awful.

He managed three more steps toward the kitchen, then caught a glimpse of something so terrible his breath froze in his throat like ice:
HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN!
He is an
OLD MONGREL
but
WE LOVE HIM!

“No,” he whispered. “Oh Mom, no.”

He didn't want to go in there where she was, but his feet turned in that direction anyway. He went with them like a hostage. He watched his hand reach out, the fingers spread, and push her bedroom door open all the way.

Her bed was still made. She lay on top of the coverlet in her dress, one leg drawn up so her knee almost touched her chest. He could see the top of her stocking and her garter, and that made him think of the lady in the calendar picture at The Corner Pocket, the one getting out of the car with most of her skirt in her
lap . . . except the lady getting out of the Packard hadn't had ugly bruises above the top of her stocking.

Liz's face was flushed where it wasn't bruised; her hair was matted with sweat; her cheeks were smeary with tears and gooey with makeup. A board creaked under Bobby's foot as he stepped into the room. She cried out and he froze, sure her eyes would open.

Instead of awakening she rolled away from him toward the wall. Here, in her room, the jumble of thoughts and images coming out of her was no clearer but ranker and more pungent, like sweat pouring off a sick person. Running through everything was the sound of Benny Goodman playing “One O'Clock Jump” and the taste of blood running down the back of her throat.

Have you seen Brautigan
, Bobby thought.
He is an old mongrel but we love him. Have you seen  . . .

She had pulled her shades before lying down and the room was very dark. He took another step, then stopped again by the table with the mirror where she sometimes sat to do her makeup. Her purse was there. Bobby thought of Ted hugging him—the hug Bobby had wanted, needed, so badly. Ted stroking his back, cupping the curve of his skull.
When I touch, I pass on a kind of window
, Ted had told him while they were coming back from Bridgeport in the cab. And now, standing by his mother's makeup table with his fists clenched, Bobby looked tentatively through that window into his mother's mind.

He caught a glimpse of her coming home on the train, huddling by herself, looking into ten thousand back yards between Providence and Harwich so as few people as possible would see her face; he saw her spying
the bright green keyfob on the shelf by the toothglass as Carol slipped into her old blouse; saw her walking Carol home, asking her questions the whole way, one after another, firing them like bullets out of a machine-gun. Carol, too shaken and worn out to dissemble, had answered them all. Bobby saw his mother walking—
limping
—down to Commonwealth Park, heard her thinking
If only some good could be salvaged from this nightmare, if only some good
, anything
good
—

He saw her sit on a bench in the shade and then get up after awhile, walking toward Spicer's for a headache powder and a Nehi to wash it down with before going back home. And then, just before leaving the park, Bobby saw her spy something tacked to a tree. These somethings were tacked up all over town; she might have passed a couple on her way to the park, so lost in thought she never noticed.

Once again Bobby felt like a passenger in his own body, no more than that. He watched his hand reach out, saw two fingers (the ones that would bear the yellow smudges of the heavy smoker in another few years) make a scissoring motion and catch what was protruding from the mouth of her purse. Bobby pulled the paper free, unfolded it, and read the first two lines in the faint light from the bedroom doorway:

HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN!

He is an
OLD MONGREL
but
WE LOVE HIM!

His eyes skipped halfway down to the lines that had no doubt riveted his mother and driven every other thought from her head:

We will pay
A VERY LARGE REWARD

($ $ $ $)

Here was the something good she had been wishing for, hoping for, praying for; here was
A VERY LARGE REWARD.

And had she hesitated? Had the thought “Wait a minute, my kid loves that old bastard-ball!” even crossed her mind?

Nah.

You
couldn't
hesitate. Because life was full of Don Bidermans, and life wasn't fair.

Bobby left the room on tiptoe with the poster still in his hand, mincing away from her in big soft steps, freezing when a board creaked under his feet, then moving on. Behind him his mom's muttering talk had subsided into low snores again. Bobby made it into the living room and closed her door behind him, holding the knob at full cock until the door was shut tight, not wanting the latch to click. Then he hurried across to the phone, aware only now that he was away from her that his heart was racing and his throat was lined with a taste like old pennies. Any vestige of hunger had vanished.

He picked up the telephone's handset, looked around quickly and narrowly to make sure his mom's door was still shut, then dialed without referring to the poster. The number was burned into his mind: HOusitonic 5-8337.

There was only silence when he finished dialing. That wasn't surprising, either, because there was no HOusitonic exchange in Harwich. And if he felt cold all over (except for his balls and the soles of his feet,
which were strangely hot), that was just because he was afraid for Ted. That was all. Just—

There was a stonelike click as Bobby was about to put the handset down. And then a voice said, “Yeah?”

It's Biderman!
Bobby thought wildly.
Cripes, it's Biderman!

“Yeah?” the voice said again. No, not Biderman's. Too low for Biderman's. But it was a nimrod voice, no doubt about that, and as his skin temperature continued to plummet toward absolute zero, Bobby knew that the man on the other end of the line had some sort of yellow coat in his wardrobe.

Suddenly his eyes grew hot and the backs of them began itching.
Is this the Sagamore Family?
was what he'd meant to ask, and if whoever answered the phone said yes, he'd meant to beg them to leave Ted alone. To tell them he, Bobby Garfield, would do something for them if they'd just leave Ted be—he'd do anything they asked. But now that his chance had arrived he could say nothing. Until this moment he still hadn't completely believed in the low men. Now something was on the other end of the line, something that had nothing in common with life as Bobby Garfield understood it.

“Bobby?” the voice said, and there was a kind of insinuate pleasure in the voice, a sensuous recognition. “Bobby,” it said again, this time without the question-mark. The flecks began to stream across Bobby's vision; the living room of the apartment suddenly filled with black snow.

“Please  . . .” Bobby whispered. He gathered all of his will and forced himself to finish. “Please let him go.”

“No can do,” the voice from the void told him. “He belongs to the King. Stay away, Bobby. Don't interfere. Ted's our dog. If you don't want to be our dog, too, stay away.”

Click
.

Bobby held the telephone to his ear a moment longer, needing to tremble and too cold to do it. The itching behind his eyes began to fade, though, and the threads falling across his vision began to merge into the general murk. At last he took the phone away from the side of his head, started to put it down, then paused. There were dozens of little red circles on the handset's perforated earpiece. It was as if the voice of the thing on the other end had caused the telephone to bleed.

Panting in soft and rapid little whimpers, Bobby put it back in its cradle and went into his room.
Don't interfere
, the man at the Sagamore Family number had told him.
Ted's our dog
. But Ted wasn't a dog. He was a man, and he was Bobby's friend.

She could have told them where he'll be tonight
, Bobby thought.
I think Carol knew. If she did, and if she told Mom
—

Bobby grabbed the Bike Fund jar. He took all the money out of it and left the apartment. He considered leaving his mother a note but didn't. She might call HOusitonic 5-8337 again if he did, and tell the nimrod with the low voice what her Bobby-O was doing. That was one reason for not leaving a note. The other was that if he could warn Ted in time, he'd go with him. Now Ted would
have
to let him come. And if the low men killed him or kidnapped him? Well, those things were almost the same as running away, weren't they?

Bobby took a final look around the apartment, and as he listened to his mother snore he felt an involuntary tugging at his heart and mind. Ted was right: in spite of everything, he loved her still. If there was
ka
, then loving her was part of his.

Still, he hoped to never see her again.

“Bye, Mom,” Bobby whispered. A minute later he was running down Broad Street Hill into the deepening gloom, one hand wrapped around the wad of money in his pocket so none of it would bounce out.

He called a cab from the pay telephone at Spicer's, and while he waited for his ride he took down a
BRAUTIGAN
lost-pet poster from the outside bulletin board. He also removed an upside-down file-card advertising a '57 Rambler for sale by the owner. He crumpled them up and threw them in the trash barrel by the door, not even bothering to look back over his shoulder to see if old man Spicer, whose foul temper was legendary among the kids on the west side of Harwich, had seen him do it.

The Sigsby twins were down here now, their jump-ropes put aside so they could play hopscotch. Bobby walked over to them and observed the shapes——drawn
beside the grid. He got down on his knees, and Dina Sigsby, who had been about to toss her stone at the 7, stopped to watch him. Dianne put her grimy fingers over her mouth and giggled. Ignoring them, Bobby used both of his hands to sweep the shapes into chalk blurs. When he was done he stood up and dusted his hands off. The pole-light in Spicer's tiny three-car parking lot came on; Bobby and the girls grew sudden shadows much longer than they were.

“Why'd you do that, stupid old Bobby Garfield?” Dina asked. “They were pretty.”

“They're bad luck,” Bobby said. “Why aren't you at home?” Not that he didn't have a good idea; it was flashing in their heads like the beer-signs in Spicer's window.

“Mumma-Daddy havin a fight,” Dianne said. “She says he got a girlfriend.” She laughed and her sister joined in, but their eyes were frightened. They reminded Bobby of the littluns in
Lord of the Flies
.

“Go home before it gets all the way dark,” he said.