Hearts In Atlantis

In the end, George Sanders was also the one who got rid of them. He had discovered he could keep the Children from reading his mind—for a little while, anyway—if he imagined a brick wall in his head, with all his most secret thoughts behind it. And after everyone had decided the Children must go (you could teach them math, but not why it was bad to punish someone by making him drive over a cliff), Sanders put a time-bomb into his briefcase and took it into the schoolroom. That was the only place where the Children—Bobby understood in some vague way that they were only supernatural ver-sions of Jack Merridew and his hunters in Lord of the Flies—were all together.

They sensed that Sanders was hiding something from them. In the movie’s final excruciating sequence, you could see bricks flying out of the wall Sanders had constructed in his head, flying faster and faster as the Children of the Damned pried into him, trying to find out what he was concealing. At last they uncovered the image of the bomb in the briefcase—eight or nine sticks of dynamite wired up to an alarm clock. You saw their creepy golden eyes widen with under-standing, but they didn’t have time to do anything. The bomb exploded. Bobby was shocked that the hero died—Randolph Scott never died in the Saturday-matinee movies at the Empire, neither did Audie Murphy or Richard Carlson—but he understood that George Sanders had given his life For the Greater Good of All. He thought he understood something else, as well: Ted’s blank-outs.

While Ted and Bobby had been visiting Midwich, the day in southern Connecticut had turned hot and glaring. Bobby didn’t like the world much after a really good movie in any case; for a little while it felt like an unfair joke, full of people with dull eyes, small plans, and facial blemishes. He sometimes thought if the world had a plot it would be so much better.

“Brautigan and Garfield hit the bricks!” Ted exclaimed as they stepped from beneath the marquee (a banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE hung from the marquee’s front). “What did you think? Did you enjoy it?”

“It was great,” Bobby said. “Fantabulous. Thanks for taking me. It was practically the best movie I ever saw. How about when he had the dynamite? Did you think he’d be able to fool them?”

“Well . . . I’d read the book, remember. Will you read it, do you think?”

“Yes!” Bobby felt, in fact, a sudden urge to bolt back to Harwich, running the whole distance down the Connecticut Pike and Asher Avenue in the hot sunshine so he could borrow The Midwich Cuck- oos with his new adult library card at once. “Did he write any other science-fiction stories?”

“John Wyndham? Oh yes, quite a few. And will no doubt write more. One nice thing about science-fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely dither five years between books. That is the preroga-tive of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.”

“Are the others as good as the one we just saw?”

“The Day of the Triffids is as good. The Kraken Wakes is even better.”

“What’s a kraken?”

They had reached a streetcorner and were waiting for the light to change. Ted made a spooky, big-eyed face and bent down toward Bobby with his hands on his knees. “It’s a monstah,” he said, doing a pretty good Boris Karloff imitation.

They walked on, talking first about the movie and then about whether or not there really might be life in outer space, and then on to the special cool ties George Sanders had worn in the movie (Ted told him that kind of tie was called an ascot). When Bobby next took notice of their surroundings they had come to a part of Bridgeport he had never been in before—when he came to the city with his mom, they stuck to downtown, where the big stores were. The stores here were small and crammed together. None sold what the big depart-ment stores did: clothes and appliances and shoes and toys. Bobby saw signs for locksmiths, check-cashing services, used books. ROD’S GUNS, read one sign. WO FATNOODLE CO., read another. FOTO FINISH-ING, read a third. Next to WO FAT was a shop selling SPECIAL SOU-VENIRS. There was something weirdly like the Savin Rock midway about this street, so much so that Bobby almost expected to see the Monte Man standing on a streetcorner with his makeshift table and his lobsterback playing cards.

Bobby tried to peer through the SPECIAL SOUVENIRS window when they passed, but it was covered by a big bamboo blind. He’d never heard of a store covering their show window during business hours. “Who’d want a special souvenir of Bridgeport, do you think?”

“Well, I don’t think they really sell souvenirs,” Ted said. “I’d guess they sell items of a sexual nature, few of them strictly legal.”

Bobby had questions about that—a billion or so—but felt it best to be quiet. Outside a pawnshop with three golden balls hanging over the door he paused to look at a dozen straight-razors which had been laid out on velvet with their blades partly open. They’d been arranged in a circle and the result was strange and (to Bobby) beautiful: look-ing at them was like looking at something removed from a deadly piece of machinery. The razors’ handles were much more exotic than the handle of the one Ted used, too. One looked like ivory, another like ruby etched with thin gold lines, a third like crystal.

“If you bought one of those you’d be shaving in style, wouldn’t you?” Bobby asked.

He thought Ted would smile, but he didn’t. “When people buy razors like that, they don’t shave with them, Bobby.”

“What do you mean?”

Ted wouldn’t tell him, but he did buy him a sandwich called a gyro in a Greek delicatessen. It came in a folded-over piece of home-made bread and was oozing a dubious white sauce which to Bobby looked quite a lot like pimple-pus. He forced himself to try it because Ted said they were good. It turned out to be the best sandwich he’d ever eaten, as meaty as a hotdog or a hamburger from the Colony Diner but with an exotic taste that no hamburger or hotdog had ever had. And it was great to be eating on the sidewalk, strolling along with his friend, looking and being looked at.

“What do they call this part of town?” Bobby asked. “Does it have a name?”

“These days, who knows?” Ted said, and shrugged. “They used to call it Greektown. Then the Italians came, the Puerto Ricans, and now the Negroes. There’s a novelist named David Goodis—the kind the college teachers never read, a genius of the drugstore paperback displays—who calls it ‘down there.’ He says every city has a neigh-borhood like this one, where you can buy sex or marijuana or a parrot that talks dirty, where the men sit talking on stoops like those men across the street, where the women always seem to be yelling for their kids to come in unless they want a whipping, and where the wine always comes in a paper sack.” Ted pointed into the gutter, where the neck of a Thunderbird bottle did indeed poke out of a brown bag. “It’s just down there, that’s what David Goodis says, the place where you don’t have any use for your last name and you can buy almost anything if you have cash in your pocket.”