Hearts In Atlantis (4 page)

“Yeah! Cripes, yeah!”
There's this bike
, he almost went on, then stopped himself.
Best keep yourself to yourself
was yet another of his mom's sayings. “I'd do just about anything you wanted!”

Ted Brautigan looked simultaneously alarmed and amused. It seemed to open a door to a different face, somehow, and Bobby could see that, yeah, the old guy had once been a young guy. One with a little sass to him, maybe. “That's a bad thing to tell a stranger,” he said, “and although we've progressed to Bobby and Ted—a good start—we're still really strangers to each other.”

“Did either of those Johnson guys say anything about strangers?”

“Not that I recall, but here's something on the subject from the Bible: ‘For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner. Spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence  . . .' ” Ted trailed off for a moment. The fun had gone out of his face and he looked old again. Then his voice firmed and he finished. “ ‘ . . . before I go hence, and be no more.' Book of Psalms. I can't remember which one.”

“Well,” Bobby said, “I wouldn't kill or rob anyone, don't worry, but I'd sure like to earn some money.”

“Let me think,” Ted said. “Let me think a little.”

“Sure. But if you've got chores or something, I'm your guy. Tell you that right now.”

“Chores? Maybe. Although that's not the word I would have chosen.” Ted clasped his bony arms around his even bonier knees and gazed across the lawn at Broad Street. It was growing dark now; Bobby's favorite part of the evening had arrived. The cars that passed had their parking lights on, and from somewhere on Asher Avenue Mrs. Sigsby was calling for her twins to come in and get their supper. At this time of day—and at dawn, as he stood in the bathroom, urinating into the bowl with sunshine falling through the little window and into his half-open eyes—Bobby felt like a dream in someone else's head.

“Where did you live before you came here, Mr. . . . Ted?”

“A place that wasn't as nice,” he said. “Nowhere near as nice. How long have
you
lived here, Bobby?”

“Long as I can remember. Since my dad died, when I was three.”

“And you know everyone on the street? On this block of the street, anyway?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“You'd know strangers. Sojourners. Faces of those unknown.”

Bobby smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh, I think so.”

He waited to see where this would lead next—it was interesting—but apparently this was as far as it went. Ted stood up, slowly and carefully. Bobby could hear little bones creak in his back when he put his hands around there and stretched, grimacing.

“Come on,” he said. “It's getting chilly. I'll go in with you. Your key or mine?”

Bobby smiled. “You better start breaking in your own, don't you think?”

Ted—it was getting easier to think of him as Ted—pulled a keyring from his pocket. The only keys on it were the one which opened the big front door and the one to his room. Both were shiny and new, the color of bandit gold. Bobby's own two keys were scratched and dull. How old was Ted? he wondered again. Sixty, at least. A sixty-year-old man with only two keys in his pocket. That was weird.

Ted opened the front door and they went into the big dark foyer with its umbrella stand and its old painting of Lewis and Clark looking out across the American West. Bobby went to the door of the Garfield apartment and Ted went to the stairs. He paused there for a moment with his hand on the bannister. “The Simak book is a great story,” he said. “Not such great writing, though. Not bad, I don't mean to say that, but take it from me, there is better.”

Bobby waited.

“There are also books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words—the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do
that
. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”

“Are there many of those, do you think?” Bobby asked.

“More than the book-snobs and play-it-safers think. Many more. Perhaps I'll give you one. A belated birthday present.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“No, but perhaps I will. And do have a happy birthday.”

“Thanks. It's been a great one.” Then Bobby went into the apartment, heated up the stew (remembering to turn off the gas-ring after the stew started to bubble, also remembering to put the pan in the sink to soak), and ate supper by himself, reading
Ring Around the Sun
with the TV on for company. He hardly heard Chet Huntley and David Brinkley gabbling the evening news. Ted was right about the book; it was a corker. The words seemed okay to him, too, although he supposed he didn't have a lot of experience just yet.

I'd like to write a story like this
, he thought as he finally closed the book and flopped down on the couch to watch
Sugarfoot. I wonder if I ever could
.

Maybe. Maybe so.
Someone
had to write stories, after all, just like someone had to fix the pipes when they froze or change the streetlights in Commonwealth Park when they burned out.

An hour or so later, after Bobby had picked up
Ring Around the Sun
and begun reading again, his mother came in. Her lipstick was a bit smeared at one corner of her mouth and her slip was hanging a little. Bobby thought of pointing this out to her, then remembered how much she disliked it when someone told her it was “snowing down south.” Besides, what did it matter? Her working day was over and, as she sometimes said, there was no one here but us chickens.

She checked the fridge to make sure the leftover stew was gone, checked the stove to make sure the gas-ring was off, checked the sink to make sure the
pot and the Tupperware storage container were both soaking in soapy water. Then she kissed him on the temple, just a brush in passing, and went into her bedroom to change out of her office dress and hose. She seemed distant, preoccupied. She didn't ask if he'd had a happy birthday.

Later on he showed her Carol's card. His mom glanced at it, not really seeing it, pronounced it “cute,” and handed it back. Then she told him to wash up, brush up, and go to bed. Bobby did so, not mentioning his interesting talk with Ted. In her current mood, that was apt to make her angry. The best thing was to let her be distant, let her keep to herself as long as she needed to, give her time to drift back to him. Yet he felt that sad mood settling over him again as he finished brushing his teeth and climbed into bed. Sometimes he felt almost hungry for her, and she didn't know.

He reached out of bed and closed the door, blocking off the sound of some old movie. He turned off the light. And then, just as he was starting to drift off, she came in, sat on the side of his bed, and said she was sorry she'd been so stand-offy tonight, but there had been a lot going on at the office and she was tired. Sometimes it was a madhouse, she said. She stroked a finger across his forehead and then kissed him there, making him shiver. He sat up and hugged her. She stiffened momentarily at his touch, then gave in to it. She even hugged him back briefly. He thought maybe it would now be all right to tell her about Ted. A little, anyway.

“I talked with Mr. Brautigan when I came home from the library,” he said.

“Who?”

“The new man on the third floor. He asked me to call him Ted.”

“You won't—I should say nitzy! You don't know him from Adam.”

“He said giving a kid an adult library card was a great present.” Ted had said no such thing, but Bobby had lived with his mother long enough to know what worked and what didn't.

She relaxed a little. “Did he say where he came from?”

“A place not as nice as here, I think he said.”

“Well, that doesn't tell us much, does it?” Bobby was still hugging her. He could have hugged her for another hour easily, smelling her White Rain shampoo and Aqua Net hold-spray and the pleasant odor of tobacco on her breath, but she disengaged from him and laid him back down. “I guess if he's going to be your friend—your
adult
friend—I'll have to get to know him a little.”

“Well—”

“Maybe I'll like him better when he doesn't have shopping bags scattered all over the lawn.” For Liz Garfield this was downright placatory, and Bobby was satisfied. The day had come to a very acceptable ending after all. “Goodnight, birthday boy.”

“Goodnight, Mom.”

She went out and closed the door. Later that night—much later—he thought he heard her crying in her room, but perhaps that was only a dream.

During the next few weeks, as the weather warmed toward summer, Ted was usually on the porch smoking when Liz came home from work. Sometimes he was alone and sometimes Bobby was sitting with him, talking about books. Sometimes Carol and Sully-John were there, too, the three kids playing pass on the lawn while Ted smoked and watched them throw. Sometimes other kids came by—Denny Rivers with a taped-up balsa glider to throw, soft-headed Francis Utterson, always pushing along on his scooter with one overdeveloped leg, Angela Avery and Yvonne Loving to ask Carol if she wanted to go over Yvonne's and play dolls or a game called Hospital Nurse—but mostly it was just S-J and Carol, Bobby's special friends. All the kids called Mr. Brautigan Ted, but when Bobby explained why it would be better if they called him Mr. Brautigan when his mom was around, Ted agreed at once.

As for his mom, she couldn't seem to get
Brautigan
to come out of her mouth. What emerged was always
Brattigan
. That might not have been on purpose, however; Bobby was starting to feel a cautious sense of relief about his mother's view of Ted. He had been afraid that she might feel about Ted as she had about Mrs. Evers, his second-grade teacher. Mom had disliked Mrs. Evers on sight, disliked her
deeply
, for no reason at all Bobby could see or understand,
and hadn't had a good word to say about her all year long—Mrs. Evers dressed like a frump, Mrs. Evers dyed her hair, Mrs. Evers wore too much makeup, Bobby had just better tell Mom if Mrs. Evers laid so much as
one finger
on him, because she looked like the kind of woman who would like to pinch and poke. All of this following a single parent-teacher conference in which Mrs. Evers had told Liz that Bobby was doing well in all his subjects. There had been four other parent-teacher conferences that year, and Bobby's mother had found reasons to duck every single one.

Liz's opinions of people hardened swiftly; when she wrote
BAD
under her mental picture of you, she almost always wrote in ink. If Mrs. Evers had saved six kids from a burning schoolbus, Liz Garfield might well have sniffed and said they probably owed the pop-eyed old cow two weeks' worth of milk-money.

Ted made every effort to be nice without actually sucking up to her (people
did
suck up to his mother, Bobby knew; hell, sometimes he did it himself), and it worked . . . but only to a degree. On one occasion Ted and Bobby's mom had talked for almost ten minutes about how awful it was that the Dodgers had moved to the other side of the country without so much as a faretheewell, but not even both of them being Ebbets Field Dodger fans could strike a real spark between them. They were never going to be pals. Mom didn't dislike Ted Brautigan the way she had disliked Mrs. Evers, but there was still something wrong. Bobby supposed he knew what it was; he had seen it in her eyes on the morning the new tenant had moved in. Liz didn't trust him.

Nor, it turned out, did Carol Gerber. “Sometimes I wonder if he's on the run from something,” she said one evening as she and Bobby and S-J walked up the hill toward Asher Avenue.

They had been playing pass for an hour or so, talking off and on with Ted as they did, and were now heading to Moon's Roadside Happiness for ice cream cones. S-J had thirty cents and was treating. He also had his Bo-lo Bouncer, which he now took out of his back pocket. Pretty soon he had it going up and down and all around, whap-whap-whap.

“On the run? Are you kidding?” Bobby was startled by the idea. Yet Carol was sharp about people; even his mother had noticed it.
That girl's no beauty, but she doesn't miss much
, she'd said one night.

“ ‘Stick em up, McGarrigle!' ” Sully-John cried. He tucked his Bo-lo Bouncer under his arm, dropped into a crouch, and fired an invisible tommygun, yanking down the right side of his mouth so he could make the proper sound to go with it, a kind of
eh-eh-eh
from deep in his throat. “ ‘You'll never take me alive, copper! Blast em, Muggsy! Nobody runs out on Rico!
Ah, jeez, they got me!
' ” S-J clutched his chest, spun around, and fell dead on Mrs. Conlan's lawn.

That lady, a grumpy old rhymes-with-witch of seventy-five or so, cried: “Boy!
Youuu
, boy! Get off there! You'll mash my flowers!”

There wasn't a flowerbed within ten feet of where Sully-John had fallen, but he leaped up at once. “Sorry, Mrs. Conlan.”

She flapped a hand at him, dismissing his apology without a word, and watched closely as the children went on their way.

“You don't really mean it, do you?” Bobby asked Carol. “About Ted?”

“No,” she said, “I guess not. But . . . have you ever watched him watch the street?”

“Yeah. It's like he's looking for someone, isn't it?”

“Or looking
out
for them,” Carol replied.

Sully-John resumed Bo-lo Bouncing. Pretty soon the red rubber ball was blurring back and forth again. Sully paused only when they passed the Asher Empire, where two Brigitte Bardot movies were playing, Adults Only, Must Have Driver's License or Birth Certificate, No Exceptions. One of the pictures was new; the other was that old standby
And God Created Woman
, which kept coming back to the Empire like a bad cough. On the posters, Brigitte was dressed in nothing but a towel and a smile.