Hearts In Atlantis (3 page)

“It's not a baby card,” he said.

“No, but it
almost
is,” she said. “I thought about getting you a grownup card, but man, they
are
gushy.”

“I know,” Bobby said.

“Are you going to be a gushy adult, Bobby?”

“I hope not,” he said. “Are you?”

“No. I'm going to be like my mom's friend Rionda.”

“Rionda's pretty fat,” Bobby said doubtfully.

“Yeah, but she's cool. I'm going to go for the cool without the fat.”

“There's a new guy moving into our building. The
room on the third floor. My mom says it's really hot up there.”

“Yeah? What's he like?” She giggled. “Is he ushy-gushy?”

“He's old,” Bobby said, then paused to think. “But he had an interesting face. My mom didn't like him on sight because he had some of his stuff in shopping bags.”

Sully-John joined them. “Happy birthday, you bastard,” he said, and clapped Bobby on the back.
Bastard
was Sully-John's current favorite word; Carol's was
cool;
Bobby was currently between favorite words, although he thought
ripshit
had a certain ring to it.

“If you swear, I won't walk with you,” Carol said.

“Okay,” Sully-John said companionably. Carol was a fluffy blonde who looked like a Bobbsey Twin after some growing up; John Sullivan was tall, black-haired, and green-eyed. A Joe Hardy kind of boy. Bobby Garfield walked between them, his momentary depression forgotten. It was his birthday and he was with his friends and life was good. He tucked Carol's birthday card into his back pocket and his new library card down deep in his front pocket, where it could not fall out or be stolen. Carol started to skip. Sully-John told her to stop.

“Why?” Carol asked. “I
like
to skip.”

“I like to say
bastard
, but I don't if you ask me,” Sully-John replied reasonably.

Carol looked at Bobby.

“Skipping—at least without a rope—is a little on the baby side, Carol,” Bobby said apologetically, then shrugged. “But you can if you want. We don't mind, do we, S-J?”

“Nope,” Sully-John said, and got going with the Bo-lo Bouncer again. Back to front, up to down, whap-whap-whap.

Carol didn't skip. She walked between them and pretended she was Bobby Garfield's girlfriend, that Bobby had a driver's license and a Buick and they were going to Bridgeport to see the WKBW Rock and Roll Extravaganza. She thought Bobby was extremely cool. The coolest thing about him was that he didn't know it.

•   •   •

Bobby got home from school at three o'clock. He could have been there sooner, but picking up returnable bottles was part of his Get-a-Bike-by-Thanksgiving campaign, and he detoured through the brushy area just off Asher Avenue looking for them. He found three Rheingolds and a Nehi. Not much, but hey, eight cents was eight cents. “It all mounts up” was another of his mom's sayings.

Bobby washed his hands (a couple of those bottles had been pretty scurgy), got a snack out of the icebox, read a couple of old
Superman
comics, got another snack out of the icebox, then watched
American Bandstand
. He called Carol to tell her Bobby Darin was going to be on—she thought Bobby Darin was deeply cool, especially the way he snapped his fingers when he sang “Queen of the Hop”—but she already knew. She was watching with three or four of her numbskull girlfriends; they all giggled pretty much nonstop in the background. The sound made Bobby think of birds in a petshop. On TV, Dick Clark was currently showing how much pimple-grease
just one
Stri-Dex Medicated Pad could sop up.

Mom called at four o'clock. Mr. Biderman needed her to work late, she said. She was sorry, but birthday supper at the Colony was off. There was leftover beef stew in the fridge; he could have that and she would be home by eight to tuck him in. And for heaven's sake, Bobby, remember to turn off the gas-ring when you're done with the stove.

Bobby returned to the television feeling disappointed but not really surprised. On
Bandstand
, Dick was now announcing the Rate-a-Record panel. Bobby thought the guy in the middle looked as if he could use a lifetime supply of Stri-Dex pads.

He reached into his front pocket and drew out the new orange library card. His mood began to brighten again. He didn't need to sit here in front of the TV with a stack of old comic-books if he didn't want to. He could go down to the library and break in his new card—his new
adult
card. Miss Busybody would be on the desk, only her real name was Miss Harrington and Bobby thought she was beautiful. She wore perfume. He could always smell it on her skin and in her hair, faint and sweet, like a good memory. And although Sully-John would be at his trombone lesson right now, after the library Bobby could go up his house, maybe play some pass.

Also
, he thought,
I can take those bottles to Spicer's—I've got a bike to earn this summer
.

All at once, life seemed very full.

•   •   •

Sully's mom invited Bobby to stay for supper, but he told her no thanks, I better get home. He would much have preferred Mrs. Sullivan's pot roast and crispy oven potatoes to what was waiting for him back at the
apartment, but he knew that one of the first things his mother would do when she got back from the office was check in the fridge and see if the Tupper-ware with the leftover stew inside was gone. If it wasn't, she would ask Bobby what he'd had for supper. She would be calm about this question, even offhand. If he told her he'd eaten at Sully-John's she would nod, ask him what they'd had and if there had been dessert, also if he'd thanked Mrs. Sullivan; she might even sit on the couch with him and share a bowl of ice cream while they watched
Sugarfoot
on TV. Everything would be fine . . . except it wouldn't be. Eventually there would be a payback. It might not come for a day or two, even a week, but it
would
come. Bobby knew that almost without knowing he knew it. She undoubtedly
did
have to work late, but eating leftover stew by himself on his birthday was also punishment for talking to the new tenant when he wasn't supposed to. If he tried to duck that punishment, it would mount up just like money in a savings account.

When Bobby came back from Sully-John's it was quarter past six and getting dark. He had two new books to read, a Perry Mason called
The Case of the Velvet Claws
and a science-fiction novel by Clifford Simak called
Ring Around the Sun
. Both looked totally ripshit, and Miss Harrington hadn't given him a hard time at all. On the contrary: she told him he was reading above his level and to keep it up.

Walking home from S-J's, Bobby made up a story where he and Miss Harrington were on a cruise-boat that sank. They were the only two survivors, saved from drowning by finding a life preserver marked
S.S.
LUSITANIC
. They washed up on a little island with palm
trees and jungles and a volcano, and as they lay on the beach Miss Harrington was shivering and saying she was cold, so cold, couldn't he please hold her and warm her up, which he of course could and did, my pleasure, Miss Harrington, and then the natives came out of the jungle and at first they seemed friendly but it turned out they were cannibals who lived on the slopes of the volcano and killed their victims in a clearing ringed with skulls, so things looked bad but just as he and Miss Harrington were pulled toward the cooking pot the volcano started to rumble and—

“Hello, Robert.”

Bobby looked up, even more startled than he'd been when Carol Gerber raced out from behind the tree to put a birthday smackeroo on his cheek. It was the new man in the house. He was sitting on the top porch step and smoking a cigarette. He had exchanged his old scuffed shoes for a pair of old scuffed slippers and had taken off his poplin jacket—the evening was warm. He looked at home, Bobby thought.

“Oh, Mr. Brautigan. Hi.”

“I didn't mean to startle you.”

“You didn't—”

“I think I did. You were a thousand miles away. And it's Ted. Please.”

“Okay.” But Bobby didn't know if he could stick to Ted. Calling a grownup (especially an
old
grownup) by his first name went against not only his mother's teaching but his own inclination.

“Was school good? You learned new things?”

“Yeah, fine.” Bobby shifted from foot to foot; swapped his new books from hand to hand.

“Would you sit with me a minute?”

“Sure, but I can't for long. Stuff to do, you know.” Supper to do, mostly—the leftover stew had grown quite attractive in his mind by now.

“Absolutely. Things to do and
tempus fugit
.”

As Bobby sat down next to Mr. Brautigan—Ted—on the wide porch step, smelling the aroma of his Chesterfield, he thought he had never seen a man who looked as tired as this one. It couldn't be the moving in, could it? How worn out could you get when all you had to move in were three little suitcases and three carryhandle shopping bags? Bobby supposed there might be men coming later on with stuff in a truck, but he didn't really think so. It was just a room—a big one, but still just a single room with a kitchen on one side and everything else on the other. He and Sully-John had gone up there and looked around after old Miss Sidley had her stroke and went to live with her daughter.

“
Tempus fugit
means time flies,” Bobby said. “Mom says it a lot. She also says time and tide wait for no man and time heals all wounds.”

“Your mother is a woman of many sayings, is she?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, and suddenly the idea of all those sayings made him tired. “Many sayings.”

“Ben Jonson called time the old bald cheater,” Ted Brautigan said, drawing deeply on his cigarette and then exhaling twin streams through his nose. “And Boris Pasternak said we are time's captives, the hostages of eternity.”

Bobby looked at him in fascination, his empty belly temporarily forgotten. He loved the idea of time as an old bald cheater—it was absolutely and completely
right, although he couldn't have said why . . . and didn't that very inability to say why somehow add to the coolness? It was like a thing inside an egg, or a shadow behind pebbled glass.

“Who's Ben Jonson?”

“An Englishman, dead these many years,” Mr. Brautigan said. “Self-centered and foolish about money, by all accounts; prone to flatulence as well. But—”

“What's that? Flatulence?”

Ted stuck his tongue between his lips and made a brief but very realistic farting sound. Bobby put his hands to his mouth and giggled into his cupped fingers.

“Kids think farts are funny,” Ted Brautigan said, nodding. “Yeah. To a man my age, though, they're just part of life's increasingly strange business. Ben Jonson said a good many wise things between farts, by the way. Not so many as
Dr
. Johnson—Samuel Johnson, that would be—but still a good many.”

“And Boris  . . .”

“Pasternak. A Russian,” Mr. Brautigan said dismissively. “Of no account, I think. May I see your books?”

Bobby handed them over. Mr. Brautigan (
Ted
, he reminded himself,
you're supposed to call him Ted
) passed the Perry Mason back after a cursory glance at the title. The Clifford Simak novel he held longer, at first squinting at the cover through the curls of cigarette smoke that rose past his eyes, then paging through it. He nodded as he did so.

“I have read this one,” he said. “I had a lot of time to read previous to coming here.”

“Yeah?” Bobby kindled. “Is it good?”

“One of his best,” Mr. Brautigan—Ted—replied.
He looked sideways at Bobby, one eye open, the other still squinted shut against the smoke. It gave him a look that was at once wise and mysterious, like a not-quite-trustworthy character in a detective movie. “But are you sure you can read this? You can't be much more than twelve.”

“I'm eleven,” Bobby said. He was delighted that Ted thought he might be as old as twelve. “Eleven today. I can read it. I won't be able to understand it all, but if it's a good story, I'll like it.”

“Your birthday!” Ted said, looking impressed. He took a final drag on his cigarette, then flicked it away. It hit the cement walk and fountained sparks. “Happy birthday dear Robert, happy birthday to you!”

“Thanks. Only I like Bobby a lot better.”

“Bobby, then. Are you going out to celebrate?”

“Nah, my mom's got to work late.”

“Would you like to come up to my little place? I don't have much, but I know how to open a can. Also, I might have a pastry—”

“Thanks, but Mom left me some stuff. I should eat that.”

“I understand.” And, wonder of wonders, he looked as if he actually did. Ted returned Bobby's copy of
Ring Around the Sun
. “In this book,” he said, “Mr. Simak postulates the idea that there are a number of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths,
parallel
Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun. A fascinating idea.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. He knew about parallel worlds from other books. From the comics, as well.

Ted Brautigan was now looking at him in a thoughtful, speculative way.

“What?” Bobby asked, feeling suddenly self-conscious.
See something green?
his mother might have said.

For a moment he thought Ted wasn't going to answer—he seemed to have fallen into some deep and dazing train of thought. Then he gave himself a little shake and sat up straighter. “Nothing,” he said. “I have a little idea. Perhaps you'd like to earn some extra money? Not that I have much, but—”