Hearts In Atlantis (48 page)

“Bobby's got stolen,” Carol said. I'm not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I've
heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. “Willie took it.”

“Willie?”

“Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn't by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby's glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby's address in Massachusetts and I'd send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was
his
glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He'd erased Bobby's—best as he could, anyway—and printed his own over where it had been. But I could still see the
bby
, from Bobby.”

A creepy sort of indignation had crept into her voice. It made her sound younger. And
look
younger. I suppose my memory could be wrong about that, but I don't think it is. Sitting there on the edge of the white light from the dining hall, I think she looked about twelve. Thirteen at the most.

“He couldn't erase the Alvin Dark signature in the pocket, though, or write over it . . . and he blushed. Dark red. Red as roses. Then—do you know what?—he apologized for what he and his two friends did to me. He was the only one who ever did, and I think he meant it. But he lied about the glove. I don't think he wanted it, it was old and the webbing was all broken out and it looked all wrong on his hand, but he lied so he could keep it. I don't understand why. I never have.”

“I'm not following this,” I said.

“Why should you? It's all jumbled up in
my
mind and I was
there
. My mother told me once that happens to people who are in accidents or fights. I remember some of it pretty well—mostly the parts with Bobby in them—but almost everything else comes from what people told me later on.

“I was in the park down the street from my house, and these three boys came along—Harry Doolin, Willie Shearman, and another one. I can't remember the other one's name. It doesn't matter, anyway. They beat me up. I was only eleven but that didn't stop them. Harry Doolin hit me with a baseball bat. Willie and the other one held me so I couldn't run away.”

“A baseball bat? Are you shitting me?”

She shook her head. “At first they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren't. My arm got dislocated. I screamed and I guess they ran away. I sat there, holding my arm, too hurt and too . . . too shocked I guess . . . to know what to do. Or maybe I tried to get up and get help for myself and couldn't. Then Bobby came along. He walked me out of the park and then he picked me up and carried me back to his apartment. All the way up Broad Street Hill on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms.”

I took the snapshot from her, held it in the light, and bent over it, looking at the boy with the crewcut. Looking at his thin stick arms, then looking at the girl. She was an inch or two taller than he was, and broader in the shoulders. I looked at the other boy, Sully. He of the tumbled black hair and the All-American grin. Stoke Jones's hair; Skip Kirk's grin. I
could see Sully carrying her in his arms, yeah, but the other kid—

“I know,” she said. “He doesn't look big enough, does he? But he carried me. I started to faint and he carried me.” She took the picture back.

“And while he was doing that, this kid Willie who helped beat you up came back and stole his glove?”

She nodded. “Bobby took me to his apartment. There was this old guy who lived in a room upstairs, Ted, who seemed to know a little bit about everything. He popped my arm back into its socket. I remember he gave me his belt to bite on when he did it. Or maybe it was Bobby's belt. He said I could catch the pain, and I did. After that . . . after that, something bad happened.”

“Worse than getting lumped up with a baseball bat?”

“In a way. I don't want to talk about it.” She wiped her tears away with one hand, first one side and then the other, still looking at the snapshot. “Later on, before he and his mother left Harwich, Bobby beat up the boy who actually used the bat. Harry Doolin.”

Carol put her photograph back in its little compartment.

“What I remember best about that day—the only thing about it
worth
remembering—is that Bobby Garfield stood up for me. Sully was bigger, and Sully
might
have stood up for me if he'd been there, but he wasn't. Bobby was there, and he carried me all the way up the hill. He did what was right. It's the best thing, the most important thing, anyone has ever done for me in my life. Do you see that, Pete?”

“Yeah. I do.”

I saw something else, too: she was saying almost exactly what Nate had said not an hour before . . . only she
had
marched. Had taken one of the signs and marched with it. Of course Nate Hoppenstand had never been beaten up by three boys who started out joking and then decided they were serious. And maybe that was the difference.

“He carried me up that hill,” she said. “I always wanted to tell him how much I loved him for that, and how much I loved him for showing Harry Doolin that there's a price to pay for hurting people, especially people who are smaller than you and don't mean you any harm.”

“So you marched.”

“I marched. I wanted to tell someone why. I wanted to tell someone who'd understand. My father won't and my mother can't. Her friend Rionda called me and said  . . .” She didn't finish, only sat there on the milk-box, fidgeting with her little bag.

“Said what?”

“Nothing.” She sounded exhausted, forlorn. I wanted to kiss her, at least put my arm around her, but I was afraid doing either would spoil what had just happened. Because something
had
happened. There was magic in her story. Not in the middle, but somewhere out around the edges. I felt it.

“I marched, and I guess I'll join the Committee of Resistance. My roommate says I'm crazy, I'll never get a job if a commie student group's part of my college records, but I think I'm going to do it.”

“And your father? What about him?”

“Fuck him.”

There was a semi-shocked moment when we considered
what she had just said, and then Carol giggled. “Now
that's
Freudian.” She stood up. “I have to go back and study. Thanks for coming out, Pete. I haven't ever shown that picture to anyone. I haven't looked at it myself in who knows how long. I feel better. Lots.”

“Good.” I got up myself. “Before you go in, will you help
me
do something?”

“Sure, what?”

“I'll show you. It won't take long.”

I walked her down the side of Holyoke and then we started up the hill behind it. About two hundred yards away was the Steam Plant parking lot, where undergrads ineligible for parking stickers (freshmen, sophomores, and most juniors) had to keep their cars. It was the prime makeout spot on campus once it got cold, but making out in my car wasn't on my mind that night.

“Did you ever tell Bobby about who got his baseball glove?” I asked. “You said you wrote to him.”

“I didn't see the point.”

We walked in silence for a little while. Then I said: “I'm going to call it off with Annmarie over Thanksgiving. I started to phone her, then didn't. If I'm going to do it, I guess I better find the guts to do it face to face.” I hadn't been aware of coming to any such decision, not consciously, but it seemed I had. Certainly it wasn't something I was saying just to please Carol.

She nodded, scuffing through the leaves in her sneakers, holding her little bag in one hand, not looking at me. “I had to use the phone. Called S-J and told him I was seeing a guy.”

I stopped. “When?”

“Last week.” Now she looked up at me. Dimples; slightly curved lower lip; the smile.

“Last
week?
And you didn't tell me?”

“It was my business,” she said. “Mine and Sully's. I mean, it isn't like he's going to come after you with a  . . .” She paused long enough for both of us to think
with a baseball bat
and then went on, “That he's going to come after you, or anything. Come on, Pete. If we're going to do something, let's do it. I'm not going riding with you, though. I really have to study.”

“No rides.”

We got walking again. The Steam Plant lot seemed huge to me in those days—hundreds of cars parked in dozens of moonlit rows. I could hardly ever remember where I left my brother's old Ford wagon. The last time I was back at UM, the lot was three, maybe even four times as big, with space for a thousand cars or more. Time passes and everything gets bigger except us.

“Hey Pete?” Walking. Looking down at her sneakers again even though we were on the asphalt now and there were no more leaves to scuff.

“Uh-huh.”

“I don't want you to go breaking up with Ann-marie because of me. Because I have an idea we're . . . temporary. All right?”

“Yeah.” What she said made me unhappy—it was what the citizens of Atlantis referred to as
a bummer
—but it didn't really surprise me. “I guess it'll have to be.”

“I like you, and I like being with you now, but it's just liking you, that's all it is, and it's best to be honest.
So if you want to keep your mouth shut when you go home for the holiday—”

“Kind of keep her around at home? Sort of like a spare tire in case we get a flat here at school?”

She looked startled, then laughed. “
Touché
,” she said.

“
Touché
for what?”

“I don't even know, Pete . . . but I
do
like you.”

She stopped, turned to me, slipped her arms around my neck. We kissed for a little while between two rows of cars, kissed until I got a pretty decent bone on, one I'm sure she could feel. Then she gave me a final peck on the lips and we started walking again.

“What did Sully say when you told him? I don't know if I'm supposed to ask, but—”

“—but you want
information
,” she said in a brusque Number Two voice. Then she laughed. It was the rueful one. “I was expecting he'd be angry, or that he might even cry. Sully's big and he scares the devil out of the football players he matches up against, but his feelings are always close to the skin. What I
didn't
expect was relief.”

“Relief?”

“Relief. He's been seeing this girl in Bridgeport for a month or more . . . except my mom's friend Rionda told me she's actually a woman, maybe twenty-four or -five.”

“Sounds like a recipe for disaster,” I said, hoping I sounded measured and thoughtful. I was actually delighted. Of course I was. And if pore ole gosh-darned tender-hearted John Sullivan stumbled into the plot of a country-western Merle Haggard song, well, four
hundred million Red Chinese wouldn't give a shit, and that went double for me.

We had almost arrived at my car. It was just one more old heap among all the others, but, courtesy of my brother, it was mine. “He's got more on his mind than his new love interest,” Carol said. “He's going into the Army when he finishes high school next June. He's already talked to the recruiter and got it arranged. He can't wait to get over there in Vietnam and start making the world safe for democracy.”

“Did you have a fight with him about the war?”

“Nope. What would be the use? For that matter, what would I tell him? That for me it's all about Bobby Garfield? That all the stuff Harry Swidrowski and George Gilman and Hunter McPhail say seems like smoke and mirrors compared to Bobby carrying me up Broad Street Hill? Sully would think I was crazy. Or say it's because I'm too smart. Sully feels sorry for people who are too smart. He says being too smart is a disease. And maybe he's right. I kind of love him, you know. He's sweet. He's also the kind of guy who needs someone to take care of him.”

And I hope he finds someone, I thought. Just as long as it's not you.

She looked judiciously at my car. “Okay,” she said. “It's ugly, it
desperately
needs a wash, but it's transportation. The question is, what're we doing here when I should be reading a Flannery O'Connor story?”

I took out my pocket-knife and opened it. “Got a nail-file in your bag?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Are we going to fight? Number Two and Number Six go at it in the Steam Plant parking lot?”

“Don't be a smartass. Just get it out and follow me.”

By the time we got around to the back of the station wagon, she was laughing—not the rueful laugh but the full-out guffaw I'd first heard when Skip's horny hotdog man came down the dishline conveyor belt. She finally understood why we were here.

Carol took one side of the bumper sticker; I took the other; we met in the middle. Then we watched the shreds blow away across the macadam.
Au revoir
, AuH
₂
O-4-USA. Bye-bye, Barry. And we laughed. Man, we just couldn't stop laughing.

A couple of days later my friend Skip, who'd come to college with the political awareness of a mollusk, put up a poster on his side of the room he shared with Brad Witherspoon. It showed a smiling businessman in a three-piece suit. One hand was extended to shake. The other was hidden behind his back, but something clutched in it was dripping blood between his shoes.
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS
, the poster said.
INVEST YOUR SON.