Hearts In Atlantis

he’d had a wife or something, he might never have gotten this bee in his bonnet about the low men. Of course if he’d had a wife, Bobby might never have read Lord of the Flies. A selfish way to think, but he couldn’t help it.

“No sign of them, Bobby?”

Bobby shook his head.

“And you feel nothing? Nothing here?” He took his right hand from Bobby’s left shoulder and tapped his own temple, where two blue veins nested, pulsing slightly. Bobby shook his head. “Or here?” Ted pulled down the corner of his right eye. Bobby shook his head again. “Or here?” Ted touched his stomach. Bobby shook his head a third time.

“Okay,” Ted said, and smiled. He slipped his left hand up to the back of Bobby’s neck. His right hand joined it. He looked solemnly into Bobby’s eyes and Bobby looked solemnly back. “You’d tell me if you did, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t try to . . . oh, I don’t know . . . to spare my feelings?”

“No,” Bobby said. He liked Ted’s hands on the back of his neck and didn’t like them at the same time. It was where a guy in a movie might put his hands just before he kissed the girl. “No, I’d tell, that’s my job.”

Ted nodded. He slowly unlaced his hands and let them drop. He got to his feet, using the table for support and grimacing when one knee popped loudly. “Yes, you’d tell me, you’re a good kid. Go on, take your walk. But stay on the sidewalk, Bobby, and be home before dark. You have to be careful these days.”

“I’ll be careful.” He started down the stairs.

“And if you see them—”

“I’ll run.”

“Yeah.” In the fading light, Ted’s face was grim. “Like hell was after you.”

So there had been touching, and perhaps his mother’s fears had been justified in a way—perhaps there had been too much touching and some of the wrong sort. Not wrong in whatever way she thought, maybe, but still wrong. Still dangerous.

On the Wednesday before school let out for the summer, Bobby saw a red strip of cloth hanging from somebody’s TV antenna over on Colony Street. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked remarkably like a kite tail. Bobby’s feet stopped dead. At the same time his heart accelerated until it was hammering the way it did when he raced Sully-John home from school.

It’s a coincidence even if it is a kite tail, he told himself. Just a lousy coincidence. You know that, don’t you?

Maybe. Maybe he knew. He had almost come to believe it, any-way, when school let out for the summer on Friday. Bobby walked home by himself that day; Sully-John had volunteered to stay and help put books away in the storeroom and Carol was going over to Tina Lebel’s for Tina’s birthday party. Just before crossing Asher Avenue and starting down Broad Street Hill, he saw a hopscotch grid drawn on the sidewalk in purple chalk. It looked like this:

“Oh Christ no,” Bobby whispered. “You gotta be kidding.”

He dropped to one knee like a cavalry scout in a western movie, oblivious of the kids passing by him on their way home—some walk-ing, some on bikes, a couple on roller skates, buck-toothed Francis Utterson on his rusty red scooter, honking laughter at the sky as he paddled along. They were almost as oblivious of him; the Big Vac had just started, and most were dazed by all the possibilities.

“Oh no, oh no, I don’t believe it, you gotta be kidding.” He reached out toward the star and the crescent moon—they were drawn in yellow chalk, not purple—almost touched them, then drew his hand back. A piece of red ribbon caught on a TV antenna didn’t have to mean anything. When you added this, though, could it still be coincidence? Bobby didn’t know. He was only eleven and there were a bazillion things he didn’t know. But he was afraid . . . afraid that . . .

He got to his feet and looked around, half-expecting to see a whole line of long, overbright cars coming down Asher Avenue, rolling slow the way cars did when they were following a hearse to the graveyard, with their headlights on in the middle of the day. Half-expecting to see men in yellow coats standing beneath the marquee of the Asher Empire or out in front of Sukey’s Tavern, smoking Camels and watching him.

No cars. No men. Just kids heading home from school. The first ones from St. Gabe’s, conspicuous in their green uniform pants and skirts, were visible among them.

Bobby turned around and backtracked for three blocks up Asher Avenue, too worried about what he’d seen chalked on the sidewalk to concern himself about bad-tempered St. Gabe’s boys. There was noth-ing on the Avenue telephone poles but a few posters advertising Bingo Nite at the St. Gabriel Parish Hall and one on the corner of Asher and Tacoma announcing a rock-and-roll show in Hartford starring Clyde McPhatter and Duane Eddy, the Man with the Twangy Guitar.

By the time he got to Asher Avenue News, which was almost all the way back to school, Bobby was starting to hope he had over-reacted. Still, he went in to look at their bulletin board, then all the way down Broad Street to Spicer’s Variety, where he bought another gumball and checked that bulletin board as well. Nothing suspicious on either one. In Spicer’s the card advertising the backyard pool was gone, but so what? The guy had probably sold it. Why else had he put the card up in the first place, for God’s sake?

Bobby left and stood on the corner, chewing his gumball and try-ing to make up his mind what to do next.

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps. Bobby Garfield made the first adult decision of his life on the day he finished the sixth grade, concluding it would be wrong to tell Ted about the stuff he had seen . . . at least for the time being.

His assumption that the low men didn’t exist had been shaken, but Bobby wasn’t ready to give it up. Not on the evidence he had so far. Ted would be upset if Bobby told him what he had seen, maybe upset enough to toss his stuff back into his suitcases (plus those carryhandle bags folded up behind his little fridge) and just take off. If there really were bad guys after him, flight would make sense, but Bobby didn’t want to lose the only adult friend he’d ever had if there weren’t. So he decided to wait and see what, if anything, happened next.

That night Bobby Garfield experienced another aspect of adult-hood: he lay awake until well after his Big Ben alarm clock said it was two in the morning, looking up at the ceiling and wondering if he had done the right thing.

IV. TED GOES BLANK. BOBBY GOES TO THE BEACH. MCQUOWN. THE WINKLE.

The day after school ended, Carol Gerber’s mom crammed her Ford Estate Wagon with kids and took them to Savin Rock, a seaside amusement park twenty miles from Harwich. Anita Gerber had done this three years running, which made it an ancient tradition to Bobby, S-J, Carol, Carol’s little brother, and Carol’s girlfriends, Yvonne, Angie, and Tina. Neither Sully-John nor Bobby would