Hearts In Atlantis

He gaped at her. “Are you kidding?”

“No. Girls always look at hopscotches, I don’t know why. Close your mouth before a bug flies in.”

He closed his mouth.

Carol nodded, satisfied, then took his hand in hers and laced her fingers through his. Bobby was amazed at what a perfect fit all those fingers made. “Now tell me the rest.”

He did, finishing with the amazing day he’d just put in: the movie, the trip to The Corner Pocket, how Alanna had recognized his father in him, the close call on the way home. He tried to explain how the purple DeSoto hadn’t seemed like a real car at all, that it only looked like a car. The closest he could come was to say it had felt alive some-how, like an evil version of the ostrich Dr. Dolittle sometimes rode in that series of talking-animal books they’d all gone crazy for in the second grade. The only thing Bobby didn’t confess was where he’d hidden his thoughts when the cab passed the William Penn Grille and the backs of his eyes began to itch.

He struggled, then blurted the worst as a coda: he was afraid that his mother going to Providence with Mr. Biderman and those other men had been a mistake. A bad mistake.

“Do you think Mr. Biderman’s sweet on her?” Carol asked. By then they were walking back to the bench where she had left her jump-rope. Bobby picked it up and handed it to her. They began walking out of the park and toward Broad Street.

“Yeah, maybe,” Bobby said glumly. “Or at least . . .” And here was part of what he was afraid of, although it had no name or real shape; it was like something ominous covered with a piece of canvas. “At least she thinks he is.”

“Is he going to ask her to marry him? If he did he’d be your step-dad.”

“God!” Bobby hadn’t considered the idea of having Don Bider-man as a stepfather, and he wished with all his might that Carol hadn’t brought such a thing up. It was an awful thought.

“If she loves him you just better get used to the idea.” Carol spoke in an older-woman, worldly-wise fashion that Bobby could have done without; he guessed she had already spent too much time this summer watching the oh John, oh Marsha shows on TV with her mom. And in a weird way he wouldn’t have cared if his mom loved Mr. Biderman and that was all. It would be wretched, certainly, because Mr. Bider-man was a creep, but it would have been understandable. More was going on, though. His mother’s miserliness about money—her cheap- skatiness—was a part of it, and so was whatever had made her start smoking again and caused her to cry in the night sometimes. The dif-ference between his mother’s Randall Garfield, the untrustworthy man who left the unpaid bills, and Alanna’s Randy Garfield, the nice guy who liked the jukebox turned up loud . . . even that might be a part of it. (Had there really been unpaid bills? Had there really been a lapsed insurance policy? Why would his mother lie about such things?) This was stuff he couldn’t talk about to Carol. It wasn’t ret-icence; it was that he didn’t know how.

They started up the hill. Bobby took one end of her rope and they walked side by side, dragging it between them on the sidewalk. Sud-denly Bobby stopped and pointed. “Look.”

There was a yellow length of kite tail hanging from one of the electrical wires crossing the street farther up. It dangled in a curve that looked sort of like a question mark.

“Yeah, I see it,” Carol said, sounding subdued. They began to walk again. “He should go today, Bobby.”

“He can’t. The fight’s tonight. If Albini wins Ted’s got to get his dough at the billiard parlor tomorrow night. I think he needs it pretty bad.”

“Sure he does,” Carol said. “You only have to look at his clothes to see he’s almost broke. What he bet was probably the last money he had.”

His clothes—that’s something only a girl would notice, Bobby thought, and opened his mouth to tell her so. Before he could, some-one behind them said, “Oh looka this. It’s the Gerber Baby and the Maltex Baby. Howya doin, babies?”

They looked around. Biking slowly up the hill toward them were three St. Gabe’s boys in orange shirts. Piled in their bike-baskets was an assortment of baseball gear. One of the boys, a pimply galoot with a silver cross dangling from his neck on a chain, had a baseball bat in a homemade sling on his back. Thinks he’s Robin Hood, Bobby thought, but he was scared. They were big boys, high-school boys, parochial school boys, and if they decided they wanted to put him in the hospital, then to the hospital he would go. Low boys in orange shirts, he thought.

“Hi, Willie,” Carol said to one of them—not the galoot with the bat slung on his back. She sounded calm, even cheery, but Bobby could hear fright fluttering underneath like a bird’s wing. “I watched you play. You made a good catch.”

The one she spoke to had an ugly, half-formed face below a mass of combed-back auburn hair and above a man’s body. The Huffy bike beneath him was ridiculously small. Bobby thought he looked like a troll in a fairy-tale. “What’s it to you, Gerber Baby?” he asked.

The three St. Gabe’s boys pulled up even with them. Then two of them—the one with the dangling cross and the one Carol had called Willie—came a little farther, standing around the forks of their bikes now, walking them. With mounting dismay Bobby realized he and Carol had been surrounded. He could smell a mixture of sweat and Vitalis coming from the boys in the orange shirts.

“Who are you, Maltex Baby?” the third St. Gabe’s boy asked Bobby. He leaned over the handlebars of his bike for a better look. “Are you Garfield? You are, ain’tcha? Billy Donahue’s still lookin for you from that time last winter. He wants to knock your teeth out. Maybe I ought to knock one or two of em out right here, give im a head start.”

Bobby felt a wretched crawling sensation begin in his stomach— something like snakes in a basket. I won’t cry again, he told himself. Whatever happens I won’t cry again even if they send me to the hos-pital. And I’ll try to protect her.

Protect her from big kids like this? It was a joke.“Why are you being so mean, Willie?” Carol asked. She spoke solely to the boy with the auburn hair. “You’re not mean when you’re by yourself. Why do you have to be mean now?”

Willie flushed. That, coupled with his dark red hair—much darker than Bobby’s—made him look on fire from the neck up. Bobby guessed he didn’t like his friends knowing he could act like a human being when they weren’t