Hearts In Atlantis

“Bobby? Is there a problem?”

“No.” Yet something nagged at him for a moment—not a connec-tion, only a momentary sense of groping toward one.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Now, here is the question: could you in good con-science—in fair conscience, at least—neglect to mention this part of your duty to your mother?”

“Yes,” Bobby said at once, although he understood doing such a thing would mark a large change in his life . . . and would be risky. He was more than a little afraid of his mom, and this fear was only partly caused by how angry she could get and how long she could bear a grudge. Mostly it grew from an unhappy sense of being loved only a little, and needing to protect what love there was. But he liked Ted . . . and he had loved the feeling of Ted’s hand lying over his own, the warm roughness of the big palm, the touch of the fingers, thick-ened almost into knots at the joints. And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.

“You’re really sure?”

If you want to learn to lie, Bobby-O, I suppose leaving things out is as good a place to start as any, an interior voice whispered. Bobby ignored it. “Yes,” he said, “really sure. Ted . . . are these guys just dan-gerous to you or to anybody?” He was thinking of his mom, but he was also thinking of himself.

“To me they could be very dangerous indeed. To other people— most other people —probably not. Do you want to know a funny thing?”

“Sure.”

“The majority of people don’t even see them unless they’re very, very close. It’s almost as if they have the power to cloud men’s minds, like The Shadow on that old radio program.”

“Do you mean they’re . . . well . . .” He supposed supernatural was the word he wasn’t quite able to say.

“No, no, not at all.” Waving his question away before it could be fully articulated. Lying in bed that night and sleepless for longer than usual, Bobby thought that Ted had almost been afraid for it to be spoken aloud. “There are lots of people, quite ordinary ones, we don’t see. The waitress walking home from work with her head down and her restaurant shoes in a paper bag. Old fellows out for their after-noon walks in the park. Teenage girls with their hair in rollers and their transistor radios playing Peter Tripp’s countdown. But children see them. Children see them all. And Bobby, you are still a child.”

“These guys don’t sound exactly easy to miss.”

“The coats, you mean. The shoes. The loud cars. But those are the very things which cause some people— many people, actually—to turn away. To erect little roadblocks between the eye and the brain. In any case, I won’t have you taking chances. If you do see the men in the yellow coats, don’t approach them. Don’t speak to them even if they should speak to you. I can’t think why they would, I don’t believe they would even see you—just as most people don’t really see them—but there are plenty of things I don’t know about them. Now tell me what I just said. Repeat it back. It’s important.”

“Don’t approach them and don’t speak to them.”

“Even if they speak to you.” Rather impatiently.

“Even if they speak to me, right. What should I do?”

“Come back here and tell me they’re about and where you saw them. Walk until you’re certain you’re out of their sight, then run. Run like the wind. Run like hell was after you.”

“And what will you do?” Bobby asked, but of course he knew. Maybe he wasn’t as sharp as Carol, but he wasn’t a complete dodo, either. “You’ll go away, won’t you?”

Ted Brautigan shrugged and finished his glass of rootbeer without meeting Bobby’s eyes. “I’ll decide when that time comes. If it comes. If I’m lucky, the feelings I’ve had for the last few days—my sense of these men—will go away.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Indeed it has. Now why don’t we talk of more pleasant things?”

For the next half an hour they discussed baseball, then music (Bobby was startled to discover Ted not only knew the music of Elvis Presley but actually liked some of it), then Bobby’s hopes and fears concerning the seventh grade in September. All this was pleasant enough, but behind each topic Bobby sensed the lurk of the low men. The low men were here in Ted’s third-floor room like peculiar shadows which cannot quite be seen.

It wasn’t until Bobby was getting ready to leave that Ted raised the subject of them again. “There are things you should look for,” he said. “Signs that my . . . my old friends are about.”

“What are they?”

“On your travels around town, keep an eye out for lost-pet posters on walls, in shop windows, stapled to telephone poles on residential streets. ‘Lost, a gray tabby cat with black ears, a white bib, and a crooked tail. Call IRoquois 7-7661.’ ‘Lost, a small mongrel dog, part beagle, answers to the name of Trixie, loves children, ours want her to come home. Call IRoquois 7-0984 or bring to 77 Peabody Street.’ That sort of thing.”

“What are you saying? Jeepers, are you saying they kill people’s pets? Do you think . . .”

“I think many of those animals don’t exist at all,” Ted said. He sounded weary and unhappy. “Even when there is a small, poorly reproduced photograph, I think most are pure fiction. I think such posters are a form of communication, although why the men who put them up shouldn’t just go into the Colony Diner and do their communicating over pot roast and mashed potatoes I don’t know.

“Where does your mother shop, Bobby?”

“Total Grocery. It’s right next door to Mr. Biderman’s real-estate agency.”