Hearts In Atlantis

Then Ted opened the fridge door and bent in. “Sure you don’t want one?” he asked. “It’s good and cold.”

“No . . . no, that’s okay.”

Ted came back to the table, and Bobby understood that he had either decided to ignore what had just happened, or didn’t remember it. He also understood that Ted was okay now, and that was good enough for Bobby. Grownups were weird, that was all. Sometimes you just had to ignore the stuff they did.

“Tell me what he said about the ending. Mr. Golding.”

“As best as I can remember, it was something like this: ‘The boys are rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser, and that is very well for them, but who will rescue the crew?’ ” Ted poured himself a glass of rootbeer, waited for the foam to subside, then poured a little more. “Does that help?”

Bobby turned it over in his mind the way he would a riddle. Hell, it was a riddle. “No,” he said at last. “I still don’t understand. They don’t need to be rescued—the crew of the boat, I mean—because they’re not on the island. Also . . .” He thought of the kids in the sandbox, one of them bawling his eyes out while the other played placidly with the stolen toy. “The guys on the cruiser are grownups. Grownups don’t need to be rescued.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Never?”

Bobby suddenly thought of his mother and how she was about money. Then he remembered the night he had awakened and thought he heard her crying. He didn’t answer.

“Consider it,” Ted said. He drew deeply on his cigarette, then blew out a plume of smoke. “Good books are for consideration after, too.”

“Okay.”

“Lord of the Flies wasn’t much like the Hardy Boys, was it?”

Bobby had a momentary image, very clear, of Frank and Joe Hardy running through the jungle with homemade spears, chanting that they’d kill the pig and stick their spears up her arse. He burst out laughing, and as Ted joined him he knew that he was done with the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brant, and Bomba the Jungle Boy. Lord of the Flies had finished them off. He was very glad he had an adult library card.

“No,” he said, “it sure wasn’t.”

“And good books don’t give up all their secrets at once. Will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Terrific. Now tell me—would you like to earn a dollar a week from me?”

The change of direction was so abrupt that for a moment Bobby couldn’t follow it. Then he grinned and said, “Cripes, yes!” Figures ran dizzily through his mind; Bobby was good enough at math to figure out a dollar a week added up to at least fifteen bucks by Sep-tember. Put with what he already had, plus a reasonable harvest of returnable bottles and some summer lawn-mowing jobs on the street . . . jeepers, he might be riding a Schwinn by Labor Day. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have to be careful about that. Quite careful.” Ted meditated quietly and for so long Bobby began to be afraid he was going to start talking about feeling stuff in the backs of his eyes again. But when Ted looked up, there was none of that strange emptiness in his gaze. His eyes were sharp, if a little rueful. “I would never ask a friend of mine—especially a young friend—to lie to his parents, Bobby, but in this case I’m going to ask you to join me in a little misdirection. Do you know what that is?”

“Sure.” Bobby thought about Sully and his new ambition to travel around with the circus, wearing a black suit and pulling rabbits out of his hat. “It’s what the magician does to fool you.”

“Doesn’t sound very nice when you put it that way, does it?”

Bobby shook his head. No, take away the spangles and the spot-lights and it didn’t sound very nice at all.

Ted drank a little rootbeer and wiped foam from his upper lip. “Your mother, Bobby. She doesn’t quite dislike me, I don’t think it would be fair to say that . . . but I think she almost dislikes me. Do you agree?”

“I guess. When I told her you might have a job for me, she got weird about it. Said I had to tell her about anything you wanted me to do before I could do it.”

Ted Brautigan nodded.

“I think it all comes back to you having some of your stuff in paper bags when you moved in. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s all I can figure.”

He thought Ted might laugh, but he only nodded again. “Perhaps that’s all it is. In any case, Bobby, I wouldn’t want you to go against your mother’s wishes.”

That sounded good but Bobby Garfield didn’t entirely believe it. If it was really true, there’d be no need for misdirection.

“Tell your mother that my eyes now grow tired quite easily. It’s the truth.” As if to prove it, Ted raised his right hand to his eyes and mas-saged the corners with his thumb and forefinger. “Tell her I’d like to hire you to read bits of the newspaper to me each day, and for this I will pay you a dollar a week—what your friend Sully calls a rock?”

Bobby nodded . . . but a buck a week for reading about how Kennedy was doing in the primaries and whether or not Floyd Pat-terson would win in June? With maybe Blondie and Dick Tracy thrown in for good measure? His mom or Mr. Biderman down at Home Town Real Estate might believe that, but Bobby didn’t.

Ted was still rubbing his eyes, his hand hovering over his narrow nose like a spider.