Hearts In Atlantis

down, all around, whapwhap-whap.

In May Bobby’s thoughts began turning to summer vacation. There was really nothing in the world better than what Sully called “the Big Vac.” He would spend long hours goofing with his friends, both on Broad Street and down at Sterling House on the other side of the park—they had lots of good things to do in the summer at Sterling House, including baseball and weekly trips to Patagonia Beach in West Haven—and he would also have plenty of time for himself. Time to read, of course, but what he really wanted to do with some of that time was find a part-time job. He had a little over seven rocks in a jar marked BIKE FUND, and seven rocks was a start . . . but not what you’d call a great start. At this rate Nixon would have been President for two years before he was riding to school.

On one of these vacation’s-almost-here days, Ted gave him a paperback book. “Remember I told you that some books have both a good story and good writing?” he asked. “This is one of that breed. A belated birthday present from a new friend. At least, I hope I am your friend.”

“You are. Thanks a lot!” In spite of the enthusiasm in his voice, Bobby took the book a little doubtfully. He was accustomed to pocket books with bright, raucous covers and sexy come-on lines (“She hit the gutter . . . AND BOUNCED LOWER!”); this one had neither. The cover was mostly white. In one corner of it was sketched— barely sketched—a group of boys standing in a circle. The name of the book was Lord of the Flies. There was no come-on line above the title, not even a discreet one like “A story you will never forget.” All in all, it had a forbidding, unwelcoming look, suggesting that the story lying beneath the cover would be hard. Bobby had nothing in particular against hard books, as long as they were a part of one’s schoolwork. His view about reading for pleasure, however, was that such stories should be easy—that the writer should do everything except move your eyes back and forth for you. If not, how much plea-sure could there be in it?

He started to turn the book over. Ted gently put his hand on Bobby’s, stopping him. “Don’t,” he said. “As a personal favor to me, don’t.”

Bobby looked at him, not understanding.

“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.”

“But what if I don’t like it?”

Ted shrugged. “T hen don’t finish it. A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually. Do you go along with that?”

Bobby nodded.

“How long would you prime a water-pump and flail the handle if nothing came out?”

“Not too long, I guess.”

“This book is two hundred pages, give or take. You read the first ten per cent—twenty pages, that is, I know already your math isn’t as good as your reading—and if you don’t like it by then, if it isn’t giving more than it’s taking by then, put it aside.”

“I wish they’d let you do that in school,” Bobby said. He was thinking of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson which they were sup-posed to memorize. “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” it started. S-J called the poet Ralph Waldo Emerslop.

“School is different.” They were sitting at Ted’s kitchen table, looking out over the back yard, where everything was in bloom. On Colony Street, which was the next street over, Mrs. O’Hara’s dog Bowser barked its endless roop-roop-roop into the mild spring air. Ted was smoking a Chesterfield. “And speaking of school, don’t take this book there with you. There are things in it your teacher might not want you to read. There could be a brouhaha.”

“A what?”

“An uproar. And if you get in trouble at school, you get in trouble at home—this I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you. And your mother . . .” The hand not holding the cigarette made a little see-sawing gesture which Bobby understood at once. Your mother doesn’t trust me.

Bobby thought of Carol saying that maybe Ted was on the run from something, and remembered his mother saying Carol didn’t miss much.

“What’s in it that could get me in trouble?” He looked at Lord of the Flies with new fascination.

“Nothing to froth at the mouth about,” Ted said dryly. He crushed his cigarette out in a tin ashtray, went to his little refrigerator, and took out two bottles of pop. There was no beer or wine in there, just pop and a glass bottle of cream. “Some talk of putting a spear up a wild pig’s ass, I think that’s the worst. Still, there is a certain kind of grownup who can only see the trees and never the forest. Read the first twenty pages, Bobby. You’ll never look back. This I promise you.”

Ted set the pop down on the table and lifted the caps with his churchkey. Then he lifted his bottle and clinked it against Bobby’s. “To your new friends on the island.”

“What island?”

Ted Brautigan smiled and shot the last cigarette out of a crumpled pack. “You’ll find out,” he said.

Bobby did find out, and it didn’t take him twenty pages to also find out that Lord of the Flies was a hell of a book, maybe the best he’d ever read. Ten pages into it he was captivated; twenty pages and he was lost. He lived on the island with Ralph and Jack and Piggy and the littluns; he trembled at the Beast that turned out to be a rotting airplane pilot caught in his parachute; he watched first in dismay and then in horror as a bunch of harmless schoolboys descended into sav-agery, finally setting out to hunt down the only one of their number who had managed to remain halfway human.

He finished the book one Saturday the week before school ended for the year. When noon came and Bobby was still in his room—no friends over to play, no Saturday-morning cartoons, not even Merrie Melodies from ten to eleven—his mom looked in on him and told him to get off his bed, get his nose out of that book, and go on down to the park or something.

“Where’s Sully?” she asked.

“Dalhouse Square. There’s a school band concert.” Bobby looked at his mother in the doorway and the ordinary stuff around her with dazed, perplexed eyes. The world of the story had become so vivid to him that this real one now seemed false and drab.