Hearts In Atlantis

Bobby nodded hesitantly, then more firmly.

“Your ma’s your ma, I don’t say nothing against anybody’s ma because I loved my own, but not everybody’s ma approves of cards or pool or . . . places like this. It’s a point of view, but that’s all it is. Get the picture?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. He did. He got the picture. He felt very strange, like laughing and crying at the same time. My dad was here, he thought. This seemed, at least for the time being, much more important than any lies his mother might have told about him. My dad was here, he might have stood right where I’m standing now. “I’m glad I look like him,” he blurted.

Alanna nodded, smiling. “You coming in here like that, just walk-ing in off the street. What are the odds?”

“I don’t know. But thanks for telling me about him. Thanks a lot.”

“He’d play that Jo Stafford song all night, if you’d let him,” Alanna said. “Now don’t you go wandering off.”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, Alanna.”

Bobby grinned. “Alanna.”

She blew him a kiss as his mother sometimes did, and laughed when Bobby pretended to catch it. Then she went back through the door. Bobby could see what looked like a living room beyond it. There was a big cross on one wall.

He reached into his pocket, hooked a finger through the keyring (it was, he thought, a special souvenir of his visit down there), and imagined himself riding down Broad Street on the Schwinn from the Western Auto. He was heading for the park. He was wearing a chocolate-colored stingybrim hat cocked back on his head. His hair was long and combed in a duck’s ass—no more crewcut, later for you, Jack. Tied around his waist was a jacket with his colors on it; riding the back of his hand was a blue tattoo, stamped deep and for-ever. Outside Field B Carol would be waiting for him. She’d be watching him ride up, she’d be thinking Oh you crazy boy as he swung the Schwinn around in a tight circle, spraying gravel toward (but not on) her white sneakers. Crazy, yes. A bad motorscooter and a mean go-getter.

Len Files and Ted were coming back now, both of them looking happy. Len, in fact, looked like the cat that ate the canary (as Bobby’s mother often said). Ted paused to pass another, briefer, word with the old guy, who nodded and smiled. When Ted and Len got back to the lobby area, Ted started toward the telephone booth just inside the door. Len took his arm and steered him toward the desk instead.

As Ted stepped behind it, Len ruffled Bobby’s hair. “I know who you look like,” he said. “It come to me while I was in the back room. Your dad was—”

“Garfield. Randy Garfield.” Bobby looked up at Len, who so resembled his sister, and thought how odd and sort of wonderful it was to be linked that way to your own blood kin. Linked so closely people who didn’t even know you could sometimes pick you out of a crowd. “Did you like him, Mr. Files?”

“Who, Randy? Sure, he was a helluva gizmo.” But Len Files seemed a little vague. He hadn’t noticed Bobby’s father in the same way his sister had, Bobby decided; Len probably wouldn’t remember about the Jo Stafford song or how Randy Garfield would give you the shirt right off his back. He wouldn’t give a drunk a drink, though; he wouldn’t do that. “Your pal’s all right, too,” Len went on, more enthusiastic now. “I like the high class and the high class likes me, but I don’t get real shooters like him in here often.” He turned to Ted, who was hunting nearsightedly through the phonebook. “Try Circle Taxi. KEnmore 6-7400.”

“Thanks,” Ted said.

“Don’t mention it.” Len brushed past Ted and went through the door behind the desk. Bobby caught another brief glimpse of the liv-ing room and the big cross. When the door shut, Ted looked over at Bobby and said: “You bet five hundred bucks on a prizefight and you don’t have to use the pay phone like the rest of the shmucks. Such a deal, huh?”

Bobby felt as if all the wind had been sucked out of him. “You bet five hundred dollars on Hurricane Haywood?”

Ted shook a Chesterfield out of his pack, put it in his mouth, lit it around a grin. “Good God, no,” he said. “On Albini.”

After he called the cab, Ted took Bobby over to the bar and ordered them both rootbeers. He doesn’t know I don’t really like rootbeer, Bobby thought. It seemed another piece in the puzzle, somehow—the puzzle of Ted. Len served them himself, saying nothing about how Bobby shouldn’t be sitting at the bar, he was a nice kid but just stink-ing the place up with his under-twenty- oneness; apparently a free phone call wasn’t all you got when you bet five hundred dollars on a prizefight. And not even the excitement of the bet could long distract Bobby from a certain dull certainty which stole much of his pleasure in hearing that his father hadn’t been such a bad guy, after all. The bet had been made to earn some runout money. Ted was leaving.

The taxi was a Checker with a huge back seat. The driver was deeply involved in the Yankees game on the radio, to the point where he sometimes talked back to the announcers.

“Files and his sister knew your father, didn’t they?” It wasn’t really a question.

“Yeah. Alanna especially. She thought he was a real nice guy.” Bobby paused. “But that’s not what my mother thinks.”

“I imagine your mother saw a side of him Alanna Files never did,” Ted replied. “More than one. People are like diamonds in that way, Bobby. They have many sides.”

“But Mom said . . .” It was too complicated. She’d never exactly said anything, really, only sort of suggested stuff. He didn’t know how to tell Ted that his mother had sides, too, and some of them made it hard to believe those things she never quite came out and said. And when you got right down to it, how much did he really want to know? His father was dead, after all. His mother wasn’t, and he had to live with her . . . and he had to love her. He had no one else to love, not even Ted. Because—

“When you going?” Bobby asked in a low voice.

“After your mother gets back.” Ted sighed, glanced out the win-dow, then looked down at his hands, which were folded on one crossed knee. He didn’t look at Bobby, not yet. “Probably Friday morning. I can’t collect my money until tomorrow night. I got four to one on Albini; that’s two grand. My good pal Lennie will have to phone New York to make the cover.”

They crossed a canal bridge, and down there was back there. Now they were in the part of the city Bobby had