Hearts In Atlantis (37 page)

“Bobby,” she said. “How are you?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Okay, I guess. I haven't seen you around.”

“You haven't come up my house.”

“No,” he said. “No, I—” What? How was he supposed to finish? “I been pretty busy,” he said lamely.

“Oh. Uh-huh.” He could have handled her being cool to him. What he couldn't handle was the fear she was trying to hide. The fear of him. As if he was a dog that might bite her. Bobby had a crazy image of himself dropping down on all fours and starting to go
roop-roop-roop
.

“I'm moving away.”

“Sully told me. But he didn't know exactly where. I guess you guys don't chum like you used to.”

“No,” Bobby said. “Not like we used to. But here.” He reached into his back pocket and brought out a piece of folded-over paper from a school notebook. Carol looked at it doubtfully, reached for it, then pulled her hand back.

“It's just my address,” he said. “We're going to Massachusetts. A town named Danvers.”

Bobby held out the folded paper but she still wasn't taking it and he felt like crying. He remembered being at the top of the Ferris wheel with her and how it was like being at the top of the whole lighted world. He remembered a towel opening like wings, feet with tiny painted toes pivoting, and the smell of perfume. “She's dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop,” Freddy Cannon sang from the radio in the other room, and it was Carol, it was Carol, it was Carol.

“I thought you might write,” he said. “I'll probably be homesick, a new town and all.”

Carol took the paper at last and put it into the pocket of her shorts without looking at it.
Probably throw it away when she gets home
, Bobby thought, but he
didn't care. She had taken it, at least. That would be enough springboard for those times when he needed to take his mind away . . . and there didn't have to be any low men in the vicinity for you to need to do that, he had discovered.

“Sully says you're different now.”

Bobby didn't reply.

“
Lots
of people say that, actually.”

Bobby didn't reply.

“Did you beat Harry Doolin up?” she asked, and gripped Bobby's wrist with a cold hand. “Did you?”

Bobby slowly nodded his head.

Carol threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so hard their teeth clashed. Their mouths parted with an audible smack. Bobby didn't kiss another girl on the mouth for three years . . . and never in his life did he have one kiss
him
like that.

“Good!” she said in a low fierce voice. It was almost a growl. “
Good!
”

Then she ran toward Broad Street, her legs—browned with summer and scabbed by many games and many sidewalks—flashing.

“Carol!” he called after her. “Carol, wait!”

She ran.

“Carol, I love you!”

She stopped at that . . . or maybe it was just that she'd reached Commonwealth Avenue and had to look for traffic. In any case she paused a moment, head lowered, and then looked back. Her eyes were wide and her lips were parted.

“Carol!”

“I have to go home, I have to make the salad,” she said, and ran away from him. She ran across the street
and out of his life without looking back a second time. Perhaps that was just as well.

•   •   •

He and his mom moved to Danvers. Bobby went to Danvers Elementary, made some friends, made even more enemies. The fights started, and not long after, so did the truancies. On the
Comments
section of his first report card, Mrs. Rivers wrote: “
Robert is an extremely bright boy. He is also extremely troubled. Will you come and see me about him, Mrs. Garfield?
”

Mrs. Garfield went, and Mrs. Garfield helped as much as she could, but there were too many things about which she could not speak: Providence, a certain lost-pet poster, and how she'd come by the money she'd used to buy into a new business and a new life. The two women agreed that Bobby was suffering from growing pains; that he was missing his old town and old friends as well. He would eventually outlast his troubles. He was too bright and too full of potential not to.

Liz prospered in her new career as a real-estate agent. Bobby did well enough in English (he got an A-plus on a paper in which he compared Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
to Golding's
Lord of the Flies
) and did poorly in the rest of his classes. He began to smoke cigarettes.

Carol
did
write from time to time—hesitant, almost tentative notes in which she talked about school and friends and a weekend trip to New York City with Rionda. Appended to one that arrived in March of 1961 (her letters always came on deckle-edged paper with teddy bears dancing down the sides) was a stark P.S.:
I think my mom & dad are going to
get a divorce. He signed up for another “hitch” and all she does is cry
. Mostly, however, she stuck to brighter things: she was learning to twirl, she had gotten new ice skates on her birthday, she still thought Fabian was cute even if Yvonne and Tina didn't, she had been to a twist party and danced every dance.

As he opened each of her letters and pulled it out Bobby would think,
This is the last. I won't hear from her again. Kids don't write letters for long even if they promise they will. There are too many new things coming along. Time goes by so fast. Too fast. She'll forget me
.

But he would not help her to do so. After each of her letters came he would sit down and write a response. He told her about the house in Brookline his mother sold for twenty-five thousand dollars—six months' salary at her old job in a single commission. He told her about the A-plus on his English theme. He told her about his friend Morrie, who was teaching him to play chess. He didn't tell her that sometimes he and Morrie went on window-breaking expeditions, riding their bikes (Bobby had finally saved up enough to buy one) as fast as they could past the scuzzy old apartment houses on Plymouth Street and throwing rocks out of their baskets as they went. He skipped the story of how he had told Mr. Hurley, the assistant principal at Danvers Elementary, to kiss his rosy red ass and how Mr. Hurley had responded by slapping him across the face and calling him an insolent, wearisome little boy. He didn't confide that he had begun shoplifting or that he had been drunk four or five times (once with Morrie, the other times by himself) or that sometimes he walked over to the train tracks and wondered if getting run over by the
South Shore Express would be the quickest way to finish the job. Just a whiff of diesel fuel, a shadow falling over your face, and then blooey. Or maybe not that quick.

Each letter he wrote to Carol ended the same way:

You are sadly missed by

Your friend
,

Bobby

Weeks would pass with no mail—not for him—and then there would be another envelope with hearts and teddy bears stuck to the back, another sheet of deckle-edged paper, more stuff about skating and baton twirling and new shoes and how she was still stuck on fractions. Each letter was like one more labored breath from a loved one whose death now seems inevitable. One more breath.

Even Sully-John wrote him a few letters. They stopped early in 1961, but Bobby was amazed and touched that Sully would try at all. In S-J's childishly big handwriting and painful misspellings Bobby could make out the approach of a good-hearted teenage boy who would play sports and lay cheerleaders with equal joy, a boy who would become lost in the thickets of punctuation as easily as he would weave through the defensive lines of opposing football teams. Bobby thought he could even see the man who was waiting for Sully up ahead in the seventies and eighties, waiting for him the way you'd wait for a taxi to arrive: a car salesman who'd eventually own his own dealership. Honest John's, of course; Honest John's Harwich Chevrolet. He'd have a big stomach hanging over his belt and lots of plaques on
the wall of his office and he'd coach youth sports and start every peptalk with
Listen up guys
and go to church and march in parades and be on the city council and all that. It would be a good life, Bobby reckoned—the farm and the rabbits instead of the stick sharpened at both ends. Although for Sully the stick turned out to be waiting after all; it was waiting in Dong Ha Province along with the old
mamasan
, the one who would never completely go away.

•   •   •

Bobby was fourteen when the cop caught him coming out of the convenience store with two six-packs of beer (Narragansett) and three cartons of cigarettes (Chesterfields, naturally; twenty-one great tobaccos make twenty wonderful smokes). This was the blond
Village of the Damned
cop.

Bobby told the cop he hadn't broken in, that the back door was open and he'd just
walked
in, but when the cop shone his flashlight on the lock it hung askew in the old wood, half gouged out.
What about this?
the cop asked, and Bobby shrugged. Sitting in the car (the cop let Bobby sit in the front seat with him but wouldn't let him have a butt when Bobby asked), the cop began filling out a form on a clipboard. He asked the sullen, skinny kid beside him what his name was. Ralph, Bobby said. Ralph Garfield. But when they pulled up in front of the house where he now lived with his mom—a whole house, upstairs and downstairs both, times were good—he told the cop he had lied.

“My name's really Jack,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” the blond
Village of the Damned
cop said.

“Yes,” Bobby said, nodding. “Jack Merridew Garfield. That's me.”

•   •   •

Carol Gerber's letters stopped coming in 1963, which happened to be the year of Bobby's first school expulsion and also the year of his first visit to Massachusetts Youth Correctional in Bedford. The cause of this visit was possession of five marijuana cigarettes, which Bobby and his friends called joysticks. Bobby was sentenced to ninety days, the last thirty forgiven for good behavior. He read a lot of books. Some of the other kids called him Professor. Bobby didn't mind.

When he got out of Bedbug Correctional, Officer Grandelle—the Danvers Juvenile Officer—came by and asked if Bobby was ready to straighten up and fly right. Bobby said he was, he had learned his lesson, and for awhile that seemed to be true. Then in the fall of 1964 he beat a boy so badly that the boy had to go to the hospital and there was some question of whether or not he would completely recover. The kid wouldn't give Bobby his guitar, so Bobby beat him up and took it. Bobby was playing the guitar (not very well) in his room when he was arrested. He had told Liz he'd bought the guitar, a Silvertone acoustic, in a pawnshop.

Liz stood weeping in the doorway as Officer Grandelle led Bobby to the police car parked at the curb. “I'm going to wash my hands of you if you don't stop!” she cried after him. “I mean it! I do!”

“Wash em,” he said, getting in the back. “Go ahead, Ma, wash em now and save time.”

Driving downtown, Officer Grandelle said, “I thought you was gonna straighten up and fly right, Bobby.”

“Me too,” Bobby said. That time he was in Bedbug for six months.

•   •   •

When he got out he cashed in his Trailways ticket and hitched home. When he let himself into the house, his mother didn't come out to greet him. “You got a letter,” she said from her darkened bedroom. “It's on your desk.”

Bobby's heart began to bang hard against his ribs as soon as he saw the envelope. The hearts and teddy bears were gone—she was too old for them now—but he recognized Carol's handwriting at once. He picked up the letter and tore it open. Inside was a single sheet of paper—deckle-edged—and another, smaller, envelope. Bobby read Carol's note, the last he ever received from her, quickly.

Dear Bobby
,

How are you. I am fine. You got something from your old friend, the one who fixed my arm that time. It came to me because I guess he didn't know where you were. He put a note in asking me to send it along. So I am. Say hi to your mom
.

No news of her adventures in twirling. No news of how she was doing with math. No news of boyfriends, either, but Bobby guessed she probably had had a few.

He picked up the sealed envelope with hands that were shaky and numb. His heart was pounding harder
than ever. On the front, written in soft pencil, was a single word: his name. It was Ted's handwriting. He knew it at once. Dry-mouthed, unaware that his eyes had filled with tears, Bobby tore open the envelope, which was no bigger than the ones in which children send their first-grade valentines.

What came out first was the sweetest smell Bobby had ever experienced. It made him think of hugging his mother when he was small, the smell of her perfume and deodorant and the stuff she put on her hair; it made him think of how Commonwealth Park smelled in the summer; it made him think of how the Harwich Library stacks had smelled, spicy and dim and somehow explosive. The tears in his eyes overspilled and began to run down his cheeks. He'd gotten used to feeling old; feeling young again—knowing he
could
feel young again—was a terrible disorienting shock.