Hearts In Atlantis

OF THE LOW MEN.

During the next few weeks, as the weather warmed toward summer, Ted was usually on the porch smoking when Liz came home from work. Sometimes he was alone and sometimes Bobby was sitting with him, talking about books. Sometimes Carol and Sully-John were there, too, the three kids playing pass on the lawn while Ted smoked and watched them throw. Sometimes other kids came by— Denny Rivers with a taped-up balsa glider to throw, soft-headed Francis Utterson, always pushing along on his scooter with one overdeveloped leg, Angela Avery and Yvonne Loving to ask Carol if she wanted to go over Yvonne’s and play dolls or a game called Hos-pital Nurse—but mostly it was just S-J and Carol, Bobby’s special friends. All the kids called Mr. Brautigan Ted, but when Bobby explained why it would be better if they called him Mr. Brautigan when his mom was around, Ted agreed at once.

As for his mom, she couldn’t seem to get Brautigan to come out of her mouth. What emerged was always Brattigan. That might not have been on purpose, however; Bobby was starting to feel a cautious sense of relief about his mother’s view of Ted. He had been afraid that she might feel about Ted as she had about Mrs. Evers, his second-grade teacher. Mom had disliked Mrs. Evers on sight, disliked her deeply, for no reason at all Bobby could see or understand, and had-n’t had a good word to say about her all year long—Mrs. Evers dressed like a frump, Mrs. Evers dyed her hair, Mrs. Evers wore too much makeup, Bobby had just better tell Mom if Mrs. Evers laid so much as one finger on him, because she looked like the kind of woman who would like to pinch and poke. All of this following a sin-gle parent-teacher conference in which Mrs. Evers had told Liz that Bobby was doing well in all his subjects. There had been four other parent-teacher conferences that year, and Bobby’s mother had found reasons to duck every single one.

Liz’s opinions of people hardened swiftly; when she wrote BAD under her mental picture of you, she almost always wrote in ink. If Mrs. Evers had saved six kids from a burning schoolbus, Liz Garfield might well have sniffed and said they probably owed the pop-eyed old cow two weeks’ worth of milk-money.

Ted made every effort to be nice without actually sucking up to her (people did suck up to his mother, Bobby knew; hell, sometimes he did it himself ), and it worked . . . but only to a degree. On one occasion Ted and Bobby’s mom had talked for almost ten minutes about how awful it was that the Dodgers had moved to the other side of the country without so much as a faretheewell, but not even both of them being Ebbets Field Dodger fans could strike a real spark between them. They were never going to be pals. Mom didn’t dislike Ted Brautigan the way she had disliked Mrs. Evers, but there was still something wrong. Bobby supposed he knew what it was; he had seen it in her eyes on the morning the new tenant had moved in. Liz didn’t trust him.

Nor, it turned out, did Carol Gerber. “Sometimes I wonder if he’s on the run from something,” she said one evening as she and Bobby and S-J walked up the hill toward Asher Avenue.

They had been playing pass for an hour or so, talking off and on with Ted as they did, and were now heading to Moon’s Roadside Happiness for ice cream cones. S-J had thirty cents and was treating. He also had his Bo-lo Bouncer, which he now took out of his back pocket. Pretty soon he had it going up and down and all around, whap-whap-whap.

“On the run? Are you kidding?” Bobby was startled by the idea. Yet Carol was sharp about people; even his mother had noticed it. That girl’s no beauty, but she doesn’t miss much, she’d said one night.

“‘Stick em up, McGarrigle!’ ” Sully-John cried. He tucked his Bo-lo Bouncer under his arm, dropped into a crouch, and fired an invisible tommygun, yanking down the right side of his mouth so he could make the proper sound to go with it, a kind of eh-eh-eh from deep in his throat. “ ‘You’ll never take me alive, copper! Blast em, Muggsy! Nobody runs out on Rico! Ah, jeez, they got me!’” S-J clutched his chest, spun around, and fell dead on Mrs. Conlan’s lawn.

That lady, a grumpy old rhymes-with-witch of seventy-five or so, cried: “Boy! Youuu, boy! Get off there! You’ll mash my flowers!”

There wasn’t a flowerbed within ten feet of where Sully-John had fallen, but he leaped up at once. “Sorry, Mrs. Conlan.”

She flapped a hand at him, dismissing his apology without a word, and watched closely as the children went on their way.

“You don’t really mean it, do you?” Bobby asked Carol. “About Ted?”

“No,” she said, “I guess not. But . . . have you ever watched him watch the street?”

“Yeah. It’s like he’s looking for someone, isn’t it?”

“Or looking out for them,” Carol replied.

Sully-John resumed Bo-lo Bouncing. Pretty soon the red rubber ball was blurring back and forth again. Sully paused only when they passed the Asher Empire, where two Brigitte Bardot movies were playing, Adults Only, Must Have Driver’s License or Birth Certifi-cate, No Exceptions. One of the pictures was new; the other was that old standby And God Created Woman, which kept coming back to the Empire like a bad cough. On the posters, Brigitte was dressed in nothing but a towel and a smile.

“My mom says she’s trashy,” Carol said.

“If she’s trash, I’d love to be the trashman,” S-J said, and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho.

“Do you think she’s trashy?” Bobby asked Carol.

“I’m not sure what that means, even.”

As they passed out from under the marquee (from within her glass ticket-booth beside the doors, Mrs. Godlow—known to the neigh-borhood kids as Mrs. Godzilla—watched them suspiciously), Carol looked back over her shoulder at Brigitte Bardot in her towel. Her expression was hard to read. Curiosity? Bobby couldn’t tell. “But she’s pretty, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And you’d have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel. That’s what I think, anyway.”

Sully-John had no interest in la femme Brigitte now that she was behind them. “Where’d Ted come from, Bobby?”

“I don’t know. He never talks about that.”

Sully-John nodded as if he expected just that answer, and threw his Bo-lo Bouncer back into gear. Up and