Hearts In Atlantis

Nine-thirty according to the sunburst clock on the living-room wall. If Bobby’s math was right, the crucial eighth round was now underway.

“How do you like The Inheritors?”

Bobby was so deep into his own thoughts that Ted’s voice made him jump. On TV, Keenan Wynn was standing in front of a bulldozer and saying he’d walk a mile for a Camel.

“It’s a lot harder than Lord of the Flies,” he said. “It seems like there are these two little families of cave people wandering around, and one family is smarter. But the other family, the dumb family, they’re the heroes. I almost gave up, but now it’s getting more inter-esting. I guess I’ll stick with it.”

“The family you meet first, the one with the little girl, they’re Neanderthals. The second family—only that one’s really a tribe, Golding and his tribes—are Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons are the inheritors. What happens between the two groups satisfies the definition of tragedy: events tending toward an unhappy outcome which cannot be avoided.”

Ted went on, talking about plays by Shakespeare and poems by Poe and novels by a guy named Theodore Dreiser. Ordinarily Bobby would have been interested, but tonight his mind kept going to Madison Square Garden. He could see the ring, lit as savagely as the few working pool-tables in The Corner Pocket had been. He could hear the crowd screaming as Haywood poured it on, smacking the surprised Eddie Albini with lefts and rights. Haywood wasn’t going to tank the fight; like the boxer in the TV show, he was going to show the other guy a serious world of hurt instead. Bobby could smell sweat and hear the heavy biff and baff of gloves on flesh. Eddie Albini’s eyes came up double zeros . . . his knees buckled . . . the crowd was on its feet, screaming . . .

“—the idea of fate as a force which can’t be escaped seems to start with the Greeks. There was a playwright named Euripides who—”

“Call,” Bobby said, and although he’d never had a cigarette in his life (by 1964 he would be smoking over a carton a week), his voice sounded as harsh as Ted’s did late at night, after a day’s worth of Chesterfields.

“Beg your pardon, Bobby?”

“Call Mr. Files and see about the fight.” Bobby looked at the sun-burst clock. Nine-forty-nine. “If it only went eight, it’ll be over now.”

“I agree that the fight is over, but if I call Files so soon he may sus-pect I knew something,” Ted said. “Not from the radio, either—this one isn’t on the radio, as we both know. It’s better to wait. Safer. Let him believe I am a man of inspired hunches. I’ll call at ten, as if I expected the result to be a decision instead of a knockout. And in the meantime, Bobby, don’t worry. I tell you it’s a stroll on the boardwalk.”

Bobby gave up trying to follow Hawaiian Eye at all; he just sat on the couch and listened to the actors quack. A man shouted at a fat Hawaiian cop. A woman in a white bathing suit ran into the surf. One car chased another while drums throbbed on the soundtrack. The hands on the sunburst clock crawled, struggling toward the ten and the twelve like climbers negotiating the last few hundred feet of Mount Everest. The man who’d murdered the socialite was killed himself as he ran around in a pineapple field and Hawaiian Eye finally ended.

Bobby didn’t wait for the previews of next week’s show; he snapped off the TV and said, “Call, okay? Please call.”

“In a moment,” Ted said. “I think I went one rootbeer over my limit. My holding-tanks seem to have shrunk with age.”

He shuffled into the bathroom. There was an interminable pause, and then the sound of pee splashing into the bowl. “Aaah!” Ted said. There was considerable satisfaction in his voice.

Bobby could no longer sit. He got up and began pacing around the living room. He was sure that Tommy “Hurricane” Haywood was right now being photographed in his corner at The Garden, bruised but beaming as the flashbulbs splashed white light over his face. The Gillette Blue Blades Girl would be there with him, her arm around his shoulders, his hand around her waist as Eddie Albini slumped forgotten in his own corner, dazed eyes puffed almost shut, still not completely conscious from the pounding he had taken.

By the time Ted returned, Bobby was in despair. He knew that Albini had lost the fight and his friend had lost his five hundred dol-lars. Would Ted stay when he found out he was broke? He might . . . but if he did and the low men came . . .

Bobby watched, fists clenching and unclenching, as Ted picked up the telephone and dialed.

“Relax, Bobby,” Ted told him. “It’s going to be okay.”

But Bobby couldn’t relax. His guts felt full of wires. Ted held the phone to his ear without saying anything for what seemed like forever.

“Why don’t they answer?” Bobby whispered fiercely.

“It’s only rung twice, Bobby. Why don’t you—hello? This is Mr. Brautigan calling. Ted Brautigan? Yes, ma’am, from this afternoon.” Incredibly, Ted tipped Bobby a wink. How could he be so cool? Bobby didn’t think he himself would have been capable of holding the phone up to his ear if he’d been in Ted’s position, let alone wink-ing. “Yes, ma’am, he is.” Ted turned to Bobby and said, without cov-ering the mouthpiece of the phone, “Alanna wants to know how is your girlfriend.”

Bobby tried to speak and could only wheeze.

“Bobby says she’s fine,” Ted told Alanna, “pretty as a summer day. May I speak to Len? Yes, I can wait. But please tell me about the fight.” There was a pause which seemed to go on forever. Ted was expressionless now. And this time when he turned to Bobby he cov-ered the mouthpiece. “She says Albini got knocked around pretty good in the first five, held his own in six and seven, then threw a right hook out of nowhere and put Haywood on the canvas in the eighth. Lights out for the Hurricane. What a surprise, eh?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. His lips felt numb. It was true, all of it. By this time Friday night Ted would be gone. With two thousand rocks in your pocket you could do a lot of running from a lot of low men; with two thousand rocks in your pocket you could ride the Big Gray Dog from sea to shining sea.

Bobby went into the bathroom and squirted Ipana on his tooth-brush. His terror that Ted had bet on the wrong fighter was gone, but the sadness of approaching loss was still there, and still growing. He never would have guessed that something that hadn’t even hap-pened could hurt so much. A week from now I won’t remember what was so neat about him. A year from now I’ll hardly remember him at all.