Hearts In Atlantis

was a sign which read TIME AND TIDE WAITFOR NO MAN. According to the clock it was twenty past eight. He was still in time, in plenty of time, and he could see an alley beyond the Pocket where he might wait in relative safety, but Bobby couldn’t just park himself and wait, even though he knew that would be the smart thing to do. If he’d really been smart, he never would have come down here in the first place. He wasn’t a wise old owl; he was a scared kid who needed help. He doubted if there was any in The Corner Pocket, but maybe he was wrong.

Bobby walked under the banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE. He had never felt less in need of air conditioning in his life; it was a hot night but he was cold all over.

God, if You’re there, please help me now. Help me to be brave . . . and help me to be lucky.

Bobby opened the door and went in.

The smell of beer was much stronger and much fresher, and the room with the pinball machines in it banged and jangled with lights and noise. Where before only Dee had been playing pinball, there now seemed to be at least two dozen guys, all of them smoking, all of them wearing strap-style undershirts and Frank Sinatra hello-young-lovers hats, all of them with bottles of Bud parked on the glass tops of the Gottlieb machines.

The area by Len Files’s desk was brighter than before because there were more lights on in the bar (where every stool was taken) as well as in the pinball room. The poolhall itself, which had been mostly dark on Wednesday, was now lit like an operating theater. There were men at every table bending and circling and making shots in a blue fog of cigarette smoke; the chairs along the walls were all taken. Bobby could see Old Gee with his feet up on the shoeshine posts, and—

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Bobby turned, startled by the voice and shocked by the sound of that word coming out of a woman’s mouth. It was Alanna Files. The door to the living-room area behind the desk was just swinging shut behind her. Tonight she was wearing a white silk blouse that showed her shoulders—pretty shoulders, creamy-white and as round as breasts—and the top of her prodigious bosom. Below the white blouse were the largest pair of red slacks Bobby had ever seen. Yes-terday, Alanna had been kind, smiling . . . almost laughing at him, in fact, although in a way Bobby hadn’t minded. Tonight she looked scared to death.

“I’m sorry . . . I know I’m not supposed to be in here, but I need to find my friend Ted and I thought . . . thought that . . .” He heard his voice shrinking like a balloon that’s been let loose to fly around the room.

Something was horribly wrong. It was like a dream he sometimes had where he was at his desk studying spelling or science or just read-ing a story and everyone started laughing at him and he realized he had forgotten to put his pants on before coming to school, he was sit-ting at his desk with everything hanging out for everyone to look at, girls and teachers and just everyone.

The beat of the bells in the gameroom hadn’t completely quit, but it had slowed down. The flood of conversation and laughter from the bar had dried up almost entirely. The click of pool and billiard balls had ceased. Bobby looked around, feeling those snakes in his stom-ach again.

They weren’t all looking at him, but most were. Old Gee was star-ing with eyes that looked like holes burned in dirty paper. And although the window in Bobby’s mind was almost opaque now— soaped over—he felt that a lot of the people in here had sort of been expecting him. He doubted if they knew it, and even if they did they wouldn’t know why. They were kind of asleep, like the people of Midwich. The low men had been in. The low men had—

“Get out, Randy,” Alanna said in a dry little whisper. In her distress she had called Bobby by his father’s name. “Get out while you still can.”

Old Gee had slid out of the shoeshine chair. His wrinkled seer-sucker jacket caught on one of the foot-pedestals and tore as he started forward, but he paid no attention as the silk lining floated down beside his knee like a toy parachute. His eyes looked more like burned holes than ever. “Get him,” Old Gee said in a wavery voice. “Get that kid.”

Bobby had seen enough. There was no help here. He scrambled for the door and tore it open. Behind him he had the sense of people starting to move, but slowly. Too slowly.

Bobby Garfield ran out into the night.

He ran almost two full blocks before a stitch in his side forced him to first slow down, then stop. No one was following and that was good, but if Ted went into T he Corner Pocket to collect his money he was finished, done, kaput. It wasn’t just the low men he had to worry about; now there was Old Gee and the rest of them to worry about, too, and Ted didn’t know it. T he question was, what could Bobby do about it?

He looked around and saw the storefronts were gone; he’d come to an area of warehouses. They loomed like giant faces from which most of the features had been erased. There was a smell of fish and sawdust and some vague rotted perfume that might have been old meat.

There was nothing he could do about it. He was just a kid and it was out of his hands. Bobby realized that, but he also realized he couldn’t let Ted walk into T he Corner Pocket without at least trying to warn him. There was nothing Hardy Boys–heroic about this, either; he simply couldn’t leave without making the effort. And it was his mother who had put him in this position. His own mother.

“I hate you, Mom,” he whispered. He was still cold, but sweat was pouring out of his body; every inch of his skin felt wet. “I don’t care what Don Biderman and those other guys did to you, you’re a bitch and I hate you.”

Bobby turned and began to trot back the way he had come, keep-ing to the shadows. Twice he heard people coming and crouched in doorways, making himself small until they had passed by. Making himself small was easy. He had never felt smaller in his life.

This time he turned into the alley. There were garbage cans on one side and a stack of cartons on the other, full of returnable bottles that smelled of beer. This cardboard column was half a foot taller than Bobby, and when he stepped behind it he was perfectly concealed from the street. Once during his wait something hot and furry brushed against his ankle and Bobby started to scream. He stifled most of it before it could get out, looked down, and saw a scruffy alleycat looking back up at him with green headlamp eyes.

“Scat, Pat,” Bobby whispered, and kicked at it. The cat revealed the needles of its teeth, hissed, then did a slow strut back down the alley, weaving around the clots of refuse and strews of broken glass, its tail lifted in what looked like disdain. Through the brick wall beside him Bobby could hear the dull throb of The Corner Pocket’s juke. Mickey and Sylvia were singing “Love Is Strange.” It was strange, all right. A big strange pain in the ass.

From his place of concealment Bobby could no longer see the mortuary clock and he’d lost any sense of how much or how little time was passing. Beyond the beer-and-garbage reek of the alley a summer streetlife opera was going on. People shouted out to each other, some-times laughing, sometimes angry, sometimes in English, sometimes in one of a dozen other languages. There was a rattle of explosions that made him stiffen—gunshots was his first idea—and then he recog-nized the sound as firecrackers, probably ladyfingers, and relaxed a lit-tle