Hearts In Atlantis (35 page)

“Bobby,” she whispered in a trembly voice. She looked like a pirate and sounded like a winning contestant on that Bill Cullen show,
The Price Is Right
. “Oh Bobby, so much
money!
Where did it come from?”

“Ted's bet,” Bobby said. “This is the payout.”

“But Ted . . . won't he—”

“He won't need it anymore.”

Liz winced as if one of her bruises had suddenly twinged. Then she began sweeping the money together, sorting the bills even as she did so. “I'm going to get you that bike,” she said. Her fingers moved with the speed of an experienced three-card monte dealer.
No one beats that shuffle
, Bobby thought.
No one has
ever
beaten that shuffle
. “First thing in the morning. Soon as the Western Auto opens. Then we'll—”

“I don't want a bike,” he said. “Not from that. And not from you.”

She froze with her hands full of money and he felt her rage bloom at once, something red and electrical. “No thanks from you, are there? I was a fool to ever expect any. God damn you if you're not the spitting image of your father!” She drew back her hand again with the fingers open. The difference this time was that he knew it was coming. She had blindsided him for the last time.

“How would you know?” Bobby asked. “You've told so many lies about him you don't remember the truth.”

And this was so. He had looked into her and there was almost no Randall Garfield there, only a box with his name on it . . . his name and a faded image that could have been almost anyone. This was the box where she kept the things that hurt her. She didn't
remember about how he liked that Jo Stafford song; didn't remember (if she had ever known) that Randy Garfield had been a real sweetie who'd give you the shirt right off his back. There was no room for things like that in the box she kept. Bobby thought it must be awful to need a box like that.

“He wouldn't buy a drunk a drink,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“What are you
talking
about?”

“You can't make me hate him . . . and you can't make me into him.” He turned his right hand into a fist and cocked it by the side of his head. “I won't be his ghost. Tell yourself as many lies as you want to about the bills he didn't pay and the insurance policy he lost out on and all the inside straights he tried to fill, but don't tell them to me. Not anymore.”

“Don't raise your hand to me, Bobby-O. Don't you ever raise your hand to me.”

In answer he held up his other hand, also fisted. “Come on. You want to hit me? I'll hit you back. You can have some more. Only this time you'll deserve it. Come on.”

She faltered. He could feel her rage dissipating as fast as it had come, and what replaced it was a terrible blackness. In it, he saw, was fear. Fear of her son, fear that he might hurt her. Not tonight, no—not with those grimy little-boy fists. But little boys grew up.

And was he so much better than her that he could look down his nose and give her the old la-de-dah? Was he
any
better? In his mind he heard the unspeakable crooning voice asking if he wanted to go back home even though it meant Ted would have to go on without him.
Yes
, Bobby had said. Even if it meant going back
to his bitch of a mother?
Yes
, Bobby had said. You understand her a little bit better now, do you? Cam had asked, and once again Bobby had said yes.

And when she recognized his step on the porch, there had at first been nothing in her mind but love and relief. Those things had been real.

Bobby unmade his fists. He reached up and took her hand, which was still held back to slap . . . although now without much conviction. It resisted at first, but Bobby at last soothed the tension from it. He kissed it. He looked at his mother's battered face and kissed her hand again. He knew her so well and he didn't want to. He longed for the window in his mind to close, longed for the opacity that made love not just possible but necessary. The less you knew, the more you could believe.

“It's just a bike I don't want,” he said. “Okay? Just a bike.”

“What
do
you want?” she asked. Her voice was uncertain, dreary. “What
do
you want from me, Bobby?”

“Pancakes,” he said. “Lots.” He tried a smile. “I am
so-ooo
hungry.”

She made enough pancakes for both of them and they ate breakfast at midnight, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. He insisted on helping her with the dishes even though it was going on toward one by then. Why not? he asked her. There was no school the next day, he could sleep as late as he wanted.

As she was letting the water out of the sink and Bobby was putting the last of their silverware away, Bowser began barking over on Colony Street:
roop-roop-roop
into the dark of a new day. Bobby's eyes met
his mother's, they laughed, and for a moment knowing was all right.

•   •   •

At first he lay in bed the old way, on his back with his heels spread to the lower corners of the mattress, but the old way no longer felt right. It felt exposed, as if anything that wanted to bag a boy could simply burst out of his closet and unzip his upturned belly with one claw. He rolled over on his side and wondered where Ted was now. He reached out, feeling for something that might be Ted, and there was nothing. Just as there had been nothing earlier, on Nasty Gansett Street. Bobby wished he could cry for Ted, but he couldn't. Not yet.

Outside, crossing the dark like a dream, came the sound of the clock in the town square: one single
bong
. Bobby looked at the luminous hands of the Big Ben on his desk and saw they were standing at one o'clock. That was good.

“They're gone,” Bobby said. “The low men are gone.”

But he slept on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest. His nights of sleeping wide open on his back were over.

Sully-John returned from camp with a tan, ten thousand healing mosquito bites, and a million tales to tell . . . only Bobby didn't hear many of them. That was the summer the old easy friendship among Bobby and
Sully and Carol broke up. The three of them sometimes walked down to Sterling House together, but once they got there they went to different activities. Carol and her girlfriends were signed up for crafts and softball and badminton, Bobby and Sully for Junior Safaris and baseball.

Sully, whose skills were already maturing, moved up from the Wolves to the Lions. And while all the boys went on the swimming and hiking safaris together, sitting in the back of the battered old Sterling House panel truck with their bathing suits and their lunches in paper sacks, S-J more and more often sat with Ronnie Olmquist and Duke Wendell, boys with whom he had been at camp. They told the same old stories about short-sheeting beds and sending the little kids on snipe hunts until Bobby was bored with them. You'd think Sully had been at camp for fifty years.

On the Fourth of July the Wolves and Lions played their annual head-to-head game. In the decade and a half going back to the end of World War II the Wolves had never won one of these matches, but in the 1960 contest they at least made a game of it—mostly because of Bobby Garfield. He went three-for-three and even without his Alvin Dark glove made a spectacular diving catch in center field. (Getting up and hearing the applause, he wished only briefly for his mother, who hadn't come to the annual holiday outing at Lake Canton.)

Bobby's last hit came during the Wolves' final turn at bat. They were down by two with a runner at second. Bobby drove the ball deep to left field, and as he took off toward first he heard S-J grunt “Good hit,
Bob!” from his catcher's position behind the plate. It
was
a good hit, but he was the potential tying run and should have stopped at second base. Instead he tried to stretch it. Kids under the age of thirteen were almost never able to get the ball back into the infield accurately, but this time Sully's Camp Winnie friend Duke Wendell threw a bullet from left field to Sully's
other
Camp Winnie friend, Ronnie Olmquist. Bobby slid but felt Ronnie's glove slap his ankle a split second before his sneaker touched the bag.

“
Yerrrrr
-
ROUT!
” cried the umpire, who had raced up from home plate to be on top of the play. On the sidelines, the friends and relatives of the Lions cheered hysterically.

Bobby got up glaring at the ump, a Sterling House counsellor of about twenty with a whistle and a white smear of zinc oxide on his nose. “I was safe!”

“Sorry, Bob,” the kid said, dropping his ump impersonation and becoming a counsellor again. “It was a good hit and a great slide but you were out.”

“Was not! You cheater! Why do you want to cheat?”

“Throw im out!” someone's dad called. “There's no call for guff like that!”

“Go sit down, Bobby,” the counsellor said.

“I was
safe!
” Bobby shouted. “Safe by a mile!” He pointed at the man who had advised he be tossed from the game. “Did he pay you to make sure we lost? That fatso there?”

“Quit it, Bobby,” the counsellor said. How stupid he looked with his little beanie hat from some nimrod college fraternity and his whistle! “I'm warning you.”

Ronnie Olmquist turned away as if disgusted by the argument. Bobby hated him, too.

“You're nothing but a cheater,” Bobby said. He could hold back the tears pricking the corners of his eyes but not the waver in his voice.

“That's the last I'll take,” the counsellor said. “Go sit down and cool off. You—”

“Cheating
cocksucker
. That's what
you
are.”

A woman close to third gasped and turned away.

“That's it,” the counsellor said in a toneless voice. “Get off the field. Right now.”

Bobby walked halfway down the baseline between third and home, his sneakers scuffling, then turned back. “By the way, a bird shit on your nose. I guess you're too dumb to figure that out. Better go wipe it off.”

It sounded funny in his head but stupid when it came out and nobody laughed. Sully was straddling home plate, big as a house and serious as a heart attack in his ragtags of catching gear. His mask, mended all over with black tape, dangled from one hand. He looked flushed and angry. He also looked like a kid who would never be a Wolf again. S-J had been to Camp Winnie, had short-sheeted beds, had stayed up late telling ghost stories around a campfire. He would be a Lion forever and Bobby hated him.

“What's wrong with you?” Sully asked as Bobby plodded by. Both benches had fallen silent. All the kids were looking at him. All the parents were looking at him, too. Looking at him as though he was something disgusting. Bobby guessed he probably was. Just not for the reasons they thought.

Guess what, S-J, maybe you been to Camp Winnie, but I been down there
. Way
down there
.

“Bobby?”

“Nothing's wrong with me,” he said without looking up. “Who cares? I'm moving to Massachusetts. Maybe there's less twinkydink cheaters there.”

“Listen, man—”

“Oh, shut up,” Bobby said without looking at him. He looked at his sneakers instead. Just looked at his sneakers and kept on walking.

•   •   •

Liz Garfield didn't make friends (“I'm a plain brown moth, not a social butterfly,” she sometimes told Bobby), but during her first couple of years at Home Town Real Estate she had been on good terms with a woman named Myra Calhoun. (In Liz-ese she and Myra saw eye to eye, marched to the same drummer, were tuned to the same wavelength, etc., etc.) In those days Myra had been Don Biderman's secretary and Liz had been the entire office pool, shuttling between agents, making their appointments and their coffee, typing their correspondence. Myra had left the agency abruptly, without much explanation, in 1955. Liz had moved up to her job as Mr. Biderman's secretary in early 1956.

Liz and Myra had remained in touch, exchanging holiday cards and the occasional letter. Myra—who was what Liz called “a maiden lady”—had moved to Massachusetts and opened her own little real-estate firm. In late June of 1960 Liz wrote her and asked if she could become a partner—a junior one to start with, of course—in Calhoun Real Estate Solutions. She had some capital she could bring with her; it wasn't a lot, but neither was thirty-five hundred dollars a spit in the ocean.

Maybe Miss Calhoun had been through the same
wringer his mom had been through, maybe not. What mattered was that she said yes—she even sent his mom a bouquet of flowers, and Liz was happy for the first time in weeks. Perhaps truly happy for the first time in years. What mattered was they were moving from Harwich to Danvers, Massachusetts. They were going in August, so Liz would have plenty of time to get her Bobby-O, her newly quiet and often glum Bobby-O, enrolled in a new school.

What also mattered was that Liz Garfield's Bobby-O had a piece of business to take care of before leaving Harwich.

•   •   •

He was too young and small to do what needed doing in a straightforward way. He would have to be careful, and he'd have to be sneaky. Sneaky was all right with Bobby; he no longer had much interest in acting like Audie Murphy or Randolph Scott in the Saturday-matinee movies, and besides, some people needed ambushing, if only to find out what it felt like. The hiding-place he picked was the little copse of trees where Carol had taken him on the day he went all ushy-gushy and started crying; a fitting spot in which to wait for Harry Doolin, old Mr. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen.

Harry had gotten a part-time stockboy job at Total Grocery. Bobby had known that for weeks, had seen him there when he went shopping with his mom. Bobby had also seen Harry walking home after his shift ended at three o'clock. Harry was usually with one or more of his friends. Richie O'Meara was his most common sidekick; Willie Shearman seemed to have dropped out of old Robin Hood's life just as
Sully had pretty much dropped out of Bobby's. But whether alone or in company, Harry Doolin always cut across Commonwealth Park on his way home.