Hearts In Atlantis (32 page)

Bobby only knew the DeSoto, but he nodded.

“Those cars ain't real cars,” Juan said. He looked sideways at Dee to see if Dee was laughing. Dee wasn't; he only nodded for Juan to keep going. “They something else.”

“I think they're alive,” Bobby said.

Juan's eyes lit up. “Yeah! Like alive! And 'ose men—”

“What did they look like? I've seen one of their cars, but not
them
.”

Juan tried but couldn't say, at least not in English. He lapsed into Spanish instead. Dee translated some of it, but in an absent fashion; more and more he was conversing with Juan and ignoring Bobby. The other corner boys—and boys were what they really were, Bobby saw—drew close and added their own contributions. Bobby couldn't understand their talk, but he thought they were scared, all of them. They were tough enough guys—down here you had to be tough just to make it through the day—but the low men had frightened them all the same. Bobby caught one final clear image: a tall striding figure in a calf-length mustard-colored coat, the kind of coat men sometimes wore in movies like
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
and
The Magnificent Seven
.

“I see four of em comin out of that barber shop with the horseparlor in the back,” the one who seemed to be named Filio said. “That's what they do, those guys, go into places and ask questions. Always leave one of their big cars runnin at the curb. You'd
think it'd be crazy to do that down here, leave a car runnin at the curb, but who'd steal one of
those
goddam things?”

No one, Bobby knew. If you tried, the steering wheel might turn into a snake and strangle you; the seat might turn into a quicksand pool and drown you.

“They come out all in a bunch,” Filio went on, “all wearin 'ose long yellow coats even though the day's so hot you coulda fried a egg on the fuckin sidewalk. They was all wearin these nice white shoes—sharp, you know how I always notice what people got on their feet, I get hard for that shit—and I don't think . . . I don't think  . . .” He paused, gathered himself, and said something to Dee in Spanish.

Bobby asked what he'd said.

“He sayin their shoes wasn' touchin the ground,” Juan replied. His eyes were big. There was no scorn or disbelief in them. “He sayin they got this big red Cri'sler, and when they go back to it, their fuckin shoes ain't quite touchin the ground.” Juan forked two fingers in front of his mouth, spat through them, then crossed himself.

No one said anything for a moment or two after that, and then Dee bent gravely over Bobby again. “These are the guys lookin for your frien'?”

“That's right,” Bobby said. “I have to warn him.”

He had a mad idea that Dee would offer to go with him to The Corner Pocket, and then the rest of the Diablos would join in; they would walk up the street snapping their fingers in unison like the Jets in
West Side Story
. They would be his friends now, gang guys who happened to have really good hearts.

Of course nothing of the sort happened. What happened
was Moso wandered off, back toward the place where Bobby had walked into him. The others followed. Juan paused long enough to say, “You run into those
caballeros
and you gonna be one dead
putino, tío mío
.” Only Dee was left and Dee said, “He's right. You ought to go back to your own part of the worl', my frien'. Let your
amigo
take care of himself.”

“I can't,” Bobby said. And then, with genuine curiosity: “Could you?”

“Not against ordinary guys, maybe, but these ain't ordinary guys. Was you just lissen?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. “But.”

“You crazy, little boy.
Poco loco
.”

“I guess so.” He
felt
crazy, all right.
Poco loco
and then some. Crazy as a shithouse mouse, his mother would have said.

Dee started away and Bobby felt his heart cramp. The big boy got to the corner—his buddies were waiting for him on the other side of the street—then wheeled back, made his finger into a gun, and pointed it at Bobby. Bobby grinned and pointed his own back.

“
Vaya con Dios, mi amigo loco
,” Dee said, then sauntered across the street with the collar of his gang jacket turned up against the back of his neck.

Bobby turned the other way and started walking again, detouring around the pools of light cast by fizzing neon signs and trying to keep in the shadows as much as he could.

•   •   •

Across the street from The Corner Pocket was a mortuary—
DESPEGNI FUNERAL PARLOR
, it said on the green awning. Hanging in the window was a clock
whose face was outlined in a chilly circle of blue neon. Below the clock was a sign which read
TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR 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. Yesterday, 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 reading 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 sitting 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 stomach again.

They weren't all looking at him, but most were. Old Gee was staring 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 seersucker 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 The 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. The 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 The 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, keeping 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, sometimes 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 recognized the sound as firecrackers, probably ladyfingers, and relaxed a little again. Cars blasted by, many of them brightly painted railjobs and jackjobs with chrome pipes and glasspack mufflers. Once there was what sounded like a fistfight with people gathered around yelling encouragement to the scufflers. Once a
lady who sounded both drunk and sad went by singing “Where the Boys Are” in a beautiful slurry voice. Once there were police sirens which approached and then faded away again.

Bobby didn't doze, exactly, but fell into a kind of daydream. He and Ted were living on a farm somewhere, maybe in Florida. They worked long hours, but Ted could work pretty hard for an old guy, especially now that he had quit smoking and had some of his wind back. Bobby went to school under another name—Ralph Sullivan—and at night they sat on the porch, eating Ted's cooking and drinking iced tea. Bobby read to him from the newspaper and when they went in to bed they slept deeply and their sleep was peaceful, interrupted by no bad dreams. When they went to the grocery store on Fridays, Bobby would check the bulletin board for lost-pet posters or upside-down file-cards advertising items for sale by owner, but he never found any. The low men had lost Ted's scent. Ted was no longer anyone's dog and they were safe on their farm. Not father and son or grandfather and grandson, but only friends.

Guys like us
, Bobby thought drowsily. He was leaning against the brick wall now, his head slipping downward until his chin was almost on his chest.
Guys like us, why shouldn't there be a place for guys like us?

Lights splashed down the alley. Each time this had happened Bobby had peered around the stack of cartons. This time he almost didn't—he wanted to close his eyes and think about the farm—but he forced himself to look, and what he saw was the stubby yellow tailfin of a Checker cab, just pulling up in front of The Corner Pocket.