Hearts In Atlantis (27 page)

“Yes  . . .” Her voice had grown distant. She looked very small sitting there in the straight-backed chair, wearing only her shorts and her sneakers. The pupils of Ted's eyes, Bobby noticed, had grown steady again.

“Put the belt in your mouth.”

She put it between her lips.

“Bite when it hurts.”

“When it hurts.”

“Catch the pain.”

“I'll catch it.”

Ted gave a final stroke of his big forefinger from her elbow to her wrist, then looked at Bobby. “Wish me luck,” he said.

“Luck,” Bobby replied fervently.

Distant, dreaming, Carol Gerber said: “Bobby threw a duck at a man.”

“Did he?” Ted asked. Very, very gently he closed his left hand around Carol's left wrist.

“Bobby thought the man was a low man.”

Ted glanced at Bobby.

“Not that kind of low man,” Bobby said. “Just . . . oh, never mind.”

“All the same,” Ted said, “they are very close. The town clock, the town whistle—”

“I heard,” Bobby said grimly.

“I'm not going to wait until your mother comes back tonight—I don't dare. I'll spend the day in a movie or a park or somewhere else. If all else fails, there are flophouses in Bridgeport. Carol, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“When the pain rises, what will you do?”

“Catch it. Bite it into Bobby's belt.”

“Good girl. Ten seconds and you are going to feel a lot better.”

Ted drew in a deep breath. Then he reached out with his right hand until it hovered just above the
lilac-colored bulge in Carol's shoulder. “Here comes the pain, darling. Be brave.”

It wasn't ten seconds; not even five. To Bobby it seemed to happen in an instant. The heel of Ted's right hand pressed directly against that knob rising out of Carol's stretched flesh. At the same time he pulled sharply on her wrist. Carol's jaws flexed as she clamped down on Bobby's belt. Bobby heard a brief creaking sound, like the one his neck sometimes made when it was stiff and he turned his head. And then the bulge in Carol's arm was gone.

“Bingo!” Ted cried. “Looks good! Carol?”

She opened her mouth. Bobby's belt fell out of it and onto her lap. Bobby saw a line of tiny points embedded in the leather; she had bitten nearly all the way through.

“It doesn't hurt anymore,” she said wonderingly. She ran her right hand up to where the skin was now turning a darker purple, touched the bruise, winced.

“That'll be sore for a week or so,” Ted warned her. “And you mustn't throw or lift with that arm for at least two weeks. If you do, it may pop out again.”

“I'll be careful.” Now Carol could look at her arm. She kept touching the bruise with light, testing fingers.

“How much of the pain did you catch?” Ted asked her, and although his face was still grave, Bobby thought he could hear a little smile in his voice.

“Most of it,” she said. “It hardly hurt at all.” As soon as these words were out, however, she slumped back in the chair. Her eyes were open but unfocused. Carol had fainted for the second time.

•   •   •

Ted told Bobby to wet a cloth and bring it to him. “Cold water,” he said. “Wring it out, but not too much.”

Bobby ran into the bathroom, got a facecloth from the shelf by the tub, and wet it in cold water. The bottom half of the bathroom window was frosted glass, but if he had looked out the top half he would have seen his mother's taxi pulling up out front. Bobby didn't look; he was concentrating on his chore. He never thought of the green keyfob, either, although it was lying on the shelf right in front of his eyes.

When Bobby came back into the living room, Ted was sitting in the straight-backed chair with Carol in his lap again. Bobby noticed how tanned her arms had already become compared to the rest of her skin, which was a pure, smooth white (except for where the bruises stood out).
She looks like she's wearing nylon stockings on her arms
, he thought, a little amused. Her eyes had begun to clear and they tracked Bobby when he moved toward her, but Carol still didn't look exactly great—her hair was mussed, her face was all sweaty, and there was that drying trickle of blood between her nostril and the corner of her mouth.

Ted took the cloth and began to wipe her cheeks and forehead with it. Bobby knelt by the arm of the chair. Carol sat up a little, raising her face gratefully against the cool and the wet. Ted wiped away the blood under her nose, then put the facecloth aside on the endtable. He brushed Carol's sweaty hair off her brow. When some of it flopped back, he moved his hand to brush it away again.

Before he could, the door to the porch banged open. Footfalls crossed the foyer. The hand on Carol's damp forehead froze. Bobby's eyes met Ted's and a
single thought flowed between them, strong telepathy consisting of a single word:
Them
.

“
No
,” Carol said, “
not
them, Bobby, it's your m—”

The apartment door opened and Liz stood there with her key in one hand and her hat—the one with the veil on it—in the other. Behind her and beyond the foyer the door to all the hot outside world stood open. Side by side on the porch welcome mat were her two suitcases, where the cab driver had put them.

“Bobby, how many times have I told you to lock this damn—”

She got that far, then stopped. In later years Bobby would replay that moment again and again, seeing more and more of what his mother had seen when she came back from her disastrous trip to Providence: her son kneeling by the chair where the old man she had never liked or really trusted sat with the little girl in his lap. The little girl looked dazed. Her hair was in sweaty clumps. Her blouse had been torn off—it lay in pieces on the floor—and even with her own eyes puffed mostly shut, Liz would have seen Carol's bruises: one on the shoulder, one on the ribs, one on the stomach.

And Carol and Bobby and Ted Brautigan saw her with that same amazed stop-time clarity: the two black eyes (Liz's right eye was really nothing but a glitter deep in a puffball of discolored flesh); the lower lip which was swelled and split in two places and still wearing flecks of dried blood like old ugly lipstick; the nose which lay askew and had grown a misbegotten hook, making it almost into a caricature Witch Hazel nose.

Silence, a moment's considering silence on a hot
summer afternoon. Somewhere a car backfired. Somewhere a kid shouted “
Come on, you guys!
” And from behind them on Colony Street came the sound Bobby would identify most strongly with his childhood in general and that Thursday in particular: Mrs. O'Hara's Bowser barking his way ever deeper into the twentieth century:
roop-roop, roop-roop-roop
.

Jack got her
, Bobby thought.
Jack Merridew and his nimrod friends
.

“Oh jeez, what happened?” he asked her, breaking the silence. He didn't want to know; he had to know. He ran to her, starting to cry out of fright but also out of grief: her face, her poor face. She didn't look like his mom at all. She looked like some old woman who belonged not on shady Broad Street but down there, where people drank wine out of bottles in paper sacks and had no last names. “What did he do? What did that bastard do to you?”

She paid no attention, seemed not to hear him at all. She laid hold of him, though; laid hold of his shoulders hard enough for him to feel her fingers sinking into his flesh, hard enough to hurt. She laid hold and then set him aside without a single look. “Let her go, you filthy man,” she said in a low and rusty voice. “Let her go right now.”

“Mrs. Garfield, please don't misunderstand.” Ted lifted Carol off his lap—careful even now to keep his hand well away from her hurt shoulder—and then stood up himself. He shook out the legs of his pants, a fussy little gesture that was all Ted. “She was hurt, you see. Bobby found her—”

“
BASTARD
!
” Liz screamed. To her right was a table with a vase on it. She grabbed the vase and threw it at
him. Ted ducked, but too slowly to avoid it completely; the bottom of the vase struck the top of his head, skipped like a stone on a pond, hit the wall and shattered.

Carol screamed.

“Mom, no!” Bobby shouted. “He didn't do anything bad! He didn't do anything bad!”

Liz took no notice. “How dare you touch her? Have you been touching my son the same way? You have, haven't you? You don't care which flavor they are, just as long as they're
young!
”

Ted took a step toward her. The empty loops of his suspenders swung back and forth beside his legs. Bobby could see blooms of blood in the scant hair on top of his head where the vase had clipped him.

“Mrs. Garfield, I assure you—”

“
Assure this, you dirty bastard!
” With the vase gone, there was nothing left on the table and so she picked up the table itself and threw it. It struck Ted in the chest and drove him backward; would have floored him if not for the straight-backed chair. Ted flopped into it, looking at her with wide, incredulous eyes. His mouth was trembling.

“Was he helping you?” Liz asked. Her face was dead white. The bruises on it stood out like birthmarks. “
Did you teach my son to help?
”

“Mom, he didn't hurt her!” Bobby shouted. He grabbed her around the waist. “He didn't hurt her, he—”

She picked him up like the vase, like the table, and he would think later she had been as strong as he had been, carrying Carol up the hill from the park. She threw him across the room. Bobby struck the wall.
His head snapped back and connected with the sunburst clock, knocking it to the floor and stopping it forever. Black dots flocked across his vision, making him think briefly and confusedly

(
coming closing in now the posters have his name on them
)

of the low men. Then he slid to the floor. He tried to stop himself but his knees wouldn't lock.

Liz looked at him, seemingly without much interest, then back at Ted, who sat in the straight-backed chair with the table in his lap and the legs poking at his face. Blood was dripping down one of his cheeks now, and his hair was more red than white. He tried to speak and what came out instead was a dry and flailing old man's cigarette cough.

“Filthy man. Filthy filthy man. For two cents I'd pull your pants down and yank that filthy thing right off you.” She turned and looked at her huddled son again, and the expression Bobby now saw in the one eye he could really see—the contempt, the accusation—made him cry harder. She didn't say
You too
, but he saw it in her eye. Then she turned back to Ted.

“Know what? You're going to jail.” She pointed a finger at him, and even through his tears Bobby saw the nail that had been on it when she left in Mr. Biderman's Merc was gone; there was a bloody-ragged weal where it had been. Her voice was mushy, seeming to spread out somehow as it crossed her oversized lower lip. “I'm going to call the police now. If you're wise you'll sit still while I do it. Just keep your mouth shut and sit still.” Her voice was rising, rising. Her hands, scratched and swelled at the knuckles as well as broken at the nails, curled into fists which she shook at him. “If you run I'll chase you and carve you up with my
longest butcher knife. See if I don't. I'll do it right on the street for everyone to see, and I'll start with the part of you that seems to give you . . . you
boys
 . . . so much trouble. So sit still,
Brattigan
. If you want to live long enough to go to jail, don't you move.”

The phone was on the table by the couch. She went to it. Ted sat with the table in his lap and blood flowing down his cheek. Bobby huddled next to the fallen clock, the one his mother had gotten with trading stamps. Drifting in the window on the breeze of Ted's fan came Bowser's cry:
roop-roop-roop
.

“You don't know what happened here, Mrs. Garfield. What happened to you was terrible and you have all my sympathy . . . but what happened to you is not what happened to Carol.”

“Shut up.” She wasn't listening, didn't even look in his direction.

Carol ran to Liz, reached out for her, then stopped. Her eyes grew large in her pale face. Her mouth dropped open. “They pulled your dress off?” It was half a whisper, half a moan. Liz stopped dialing and turned slowly to look at her. “Why did they pull your dress off?”

Liz seemed to think about how to answer. She seemed to think hard. “Shut up,” she said at last. “Just shut up, okay?”

“Why did they chase you? Who's hitting?” Carol's voice had become uneven. “Who's
hitting?
”

“
Shut up!
” Liz dropped the telephone and put her hands to her ears. Bobby looked at her with growing horror.

Carol turned to him. Fresh tears were rolling down her cheeks. There was knowing in her eyes—
knowing
.
The kind, Bobby thought, that he had felt while Mr. McQuown had been trying to fool him.

“They chased her,” Carol said. “When she tried to leave they chased her and made her come back.”

Bobby knew. They had chased her down a hotel corridor. He had seen it. He couldn't remember where, but he had.

“
Make them stop doing it! Make me stop seeing it!
” Carol screamed. “
She's hitting them but she can't get away! She's hitting them but she can't get away!
”

Ted tipped the table out of his lap and struggled to his feet. His eyes were blazing. “Hug her, Carol! Hug her tight! That will make it stop!”

Carol threw her good arm around Bobby's mother. Liz staggered backward a step, almost falling when one of her shoes hooked the leg of the sofa. She stayed up but the telephone tumbled to the rug beside one of Bobby's outstretched sneakers, burring harshly.