Hearts In Atlantis

cord looped neatly around the base, under one arm. “Your mother was right about this,” he said. When he bent to plug it in, another goose flew out of his ass.

“She usually is,” Bobby said, and that struck them both funny. They sat in the living room with the fan rotating back and forth, stir-ring the increasingly fragrant air. Bobby thought if he didn’t stop laughing soon his head would pop.

When Bronco was over (by then Bobby had lost all track of the story), he helped Ted pull out the couch. T he bed which had been hiding inside it didn’t look all that great, but Liz had made it up with some spare sheets and blankets and Ted said it would be fine. Bobby brushed his teeth, then looked out from the door of his bedroom at Ted, who was sitting on the end of the sofa-bed and watching the news.

“Goodnight,” Bobby said.

Ted looked over to him, and for a moment Bobby thought Ted would get up, cross the room, give him a hug and maybe a kiss. Instead of that, he sketched a funny, awkward little salute. “Sleep well, Bobby.”

“Thanks.”

Bobby closed his bedroom door, turned off the light, got into bed, and spread his heels to the corners of the mattress. As he looked up into the dark he remembered the morning Ted had taken hold of his shoulders, then laced his bunchy old hands together behind his neck. Their faces that day had been almost as close as his and Carol’s had been on the Ferris wheel just before they kissed. The day he had argued with his mother. The day he had known about the money taped in the catalogue. Also the day he had won ninety cents from Mr. McQuown. Go buy yourself a martini, Mr. McQuown had said.

Had it come from Ted? Had the winkle come from Ted touching him?

“Yeah,” Bobby whispered in the dark. “Yeah, I think it probably did.”

What if he touches me again that way?

Bobby was still considering this idea when he fell asleep.

He dreamed that people were chasing his mother through the jun-gle—Jack and Piggy, the littluns, and Don Biderman, Cushman, and Dean. His mother was wearing her new dress from Gowns by Lucie, the black one with the thin straps, only it had been torn in places by thorns and branches. Her stockings were in tatters. They looked like strips of dead skin hanging off her legs. Her eyes were deep sweatholes gleaming with terror. The boys chasing her were naked. Biderman and the other two were wearing their business suits. All of them had alternating streaks of red and white paint on their faces; all were brandishing spears and shouting Kill the pig, slit her throat! Kill the pig, drink her blood! Kill the pig, strew her guts!

He woke in the gray light of dawn, shivering, and got up to use the bathroom. By the time he went back to bed he could no longer remember precisely what he had dreamed. He slept for another two hours, and woke up to the good smells of bacon and eggs. Bright summer sunshine was slanting in his bedroom window and Ted was making breakfast.

Village of the Damned was the last and greatest movie of Bobby Garfield’s childhood; it was the first and greatest movie of what came after childhood—a dark period when he was often bad and always confused, a Bobby Garfield he felt he didn’t really know. The cop who arrested him for the first time had blond hair, and what came to Bobby’s mind as the cop led him away from the mom ’n pop store Bobby had broken into (by then he and his mother were living in a suburb north of Boston) were all those blond kids in Village of the Damned. The cop could have been one of them all grown up.

The movie was playing at the Criterion, the very avatar of those Bridgeport dream-palaces Bobby had been thinking about the night before. It was in black and white, but the contrasts were sharp, not all fuzzy like on the Zenith back in the apartment, and the images were enormous. So were the sounds, especially the shivery theremin music that played when the Midwich children really started to use their power.

Bobby was enthralled by the story, understanding even before the first five minutes were over that it was a real story, the way Lord of the Flies had been a real story. The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier. He guessed that Sully-John would have been bored with it, except for the ending. S-J liked to see giant scorpions crushing Mexico City or Rodan stomping Tokyo; beyond that his interest in what he called “creature features” was limited. But Sully wasn’t here, and for the first time since he’d left, Bobby was glad.

They were in time for the one o’clock matinee, and the theater was almost deserted. Ted (wearing his fedora and with his dark glasses folded into the breast pocket of his shirt) bought a big bag of pop-corn, a box of Dots, a Coke for Bobby, and a rootbeer (of course!) for himself. Every now and then he would pass Bobby the popcorn or the candy and Bobby would take some, but he was hardly aware that he was eating, let alone of what he was eating.

The movie began with everyone in the British village of Midwich falling asleep (a man who was driving a tractor at the time of the event was killed; so was a woman who fell face-first onto a lighted stove burner). The military was notified, and they sent a reconnais-sance plane to take a look. The pilot fell asleep as soon as he was over Midwich airspace; the plane crashed. A soldier with a rope around his middle walked ten or twelve paces into the village, then swooned into a deep sleep. When he was dragged back, he awakened as soon as he was hauled over the “sleep-line” that had been painted across the highway.

Everyone in Midwich woke up eventually, and everything seemed to be all right . . . until, a few weeks later, the women in town dis-covered they were pregnant. Old women, young women, even girls Carol Gerber’s age, all pregnant, and the children they gave birth to were those spooky kids from the poster, the ones with the blond hair and the glowing eyes.

Although the movie never said, Bobby figured the Children of the Damned must have been caused by some sort of outer-space phe-nomenon, like the pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In any case, they grew up faster than normal kids, they were super-smart, they could make people do what they wanted . . . and they were ruthless. When one father tried to discipline his particular Child of the Damned, all the kids clubbed together and directed their thoughts at the offending grownup (their eyes glowing, that theremin music so pulsing and strange that Bobby’s arms broke out in goosebumps as he drank his Coke) until the guy put a shotgun to his head and killed himself (that part wasn’t shown, and Bobby was glad).

The hero was George Sanders. His wife gave birth to one of the blond children. S-J would have scoffed at George, called him a “queer bastard” or a “golden oldie,” but Bobby found him a welcome change from heroes like Randolph Scott, Richard Carlson, and the inevitable Audie Murphy. George was really sort of ripshit, in a weird English way. In the words of Denny Rivers, old George knew how to lay chilly. He wore special cool ties and combed his hair back tight to his skull. He didn’t look as though he could beat up a bunch of saloon baddies or anything, but he was the only guy from Midwich the Children of the Damned would have anything to do with; in fact they drafted him to be their teacher. Bobby couldn’t imagine Ran-dolph Scott or Audie Murphy teaching a bunch of super-smart kids from outer space anything.