Hearts In Atlantis (7 page)

Bobby shook his head. No, take away the spangles and the spotlights and it didn't sound very nice at all.

Ted drank a little rootbeer and wiped foam from his upper lip. “Your mother, Bobby. She doesn't quite dislike me, I don't think it would be fair to say that . . . but I think she
almost
dislikes me. Do you agree?”

“I guess. When I told her you might have a job for me, she got weird about it. Said I had to tell her about anything you wanted me to do before I could do it.”

Ted Brautigan nodded.

“I think it all comes back to you having some of your stuff in paper bags when you moved in. I know that sounds nuts, but it's all I can figure.”

He thought Ted might laugh, but he only nodded again. “Perhaps that's all it is. In any case, Bobby, I wouldn't want you to go against your mother's wishes.”

That sounded good but Bobby Garfield didn't entirely believe it. If it was really true, there'd be no need for misdirection.

“Tell your mother that my eyes now grow tired quite easily. It's the truth.” As if to prove it, Ted raised his right hand to his eyes and massaged the corners with his thumb and forefinger. “Tell her I'd like to hire you to read bits of the newspaper to me each day, and for this I will pay you a dollar a week—what your friend Sully calls a rock?”

Bobby nodded . . . but a buck a week for reading about how Kennedy was doing in the primaries and whether or not Floyd Patterson would win in June? With maybe
Blondie
and
Dick Tracy
thrown in for good measure? His mom or Mr. Biderman down at Home Town Real Estate might believe that, but Bobby didn't.

Ted was still rubbing his eyes, his hand hovering over his narrow nose like a spider.

“What else?” Bobby asked. His voice came out sounding strangely flat, like his mom's voice when he'd promised to pick up his room and she came in at the end of the day to find the job still undone. “What's the real job?”

“I want you to keep your eyes open, that's all,” Ted said.

“For what?”

“Low men in yellow coats.” Ted's fingers were still working the corners of his eyes. Bobby wished he'd stop; there was something creepy about it. Did he feel
something behind them, was that why he kept rubbing and kneading that way? Something that broke his attention, interfered with his normally sane and well-ordered way of thinking?

“Lo
mein?
” It was what his mother ordered on the occasions when they went out to Sing Lu's on Barnum Avenue. Lo mein in yellow coats made no sense, but it was all he could think of.

Ted laughed, a sunny, genuine laugh that made Bobby aware of just how uneasy he'd been.

“Low
men
,” Ted said. “I use ‘low' in the Dickensian sense, meaning fellows who look rather stupid . . . and rather dangerous as well. The sort of men who'd shoot craps in an alley, let's say, and pass around a bottle of liquor in a paper bag during the game. The sort who lean against telephone poles and whistle at women walking by on the other side of the street while they mop the backs of their necks with handkerchiefs that are never quite clean. Men who think hats with feathers in the brims are sophisticated. Men who look like they know all the right answers to all of life's stupid questions. I'm not being terribly clear, am I? Is any of this getting through to you, is any of it ringing a bell?”

Yeah, it was. In a way it was like hearing time described as the old bald cheater: a sense that the word or phrase was exactly right even though you couldn't say just why. It reminded him of how Mr. Biderman always looked unshaven even when you could still smell sweet aftershave drying on his cheeks, the way you somehow knew Mr. Biderman would pick his nose when he was alone in his car or check the coin return of any pay telephone he walked past without even thinking about it.

“I get you,” he said.

“Good. I'd never in a hundred lifetimes ask you to speak to such men, or even approach them. But I
would
ask you to keep an eye out, make a circuit of the block once a day—Broad Street, Commonwealth Street, Colony Street, Asher Avenue, then back here to 149—and just see what you see.”

It was starting to fit together in Bobby's mind. On his birthday—which had also been Ted's first day at 149—Ted had asked him if he knew everyone on the street, if he would recognize

(
sojourners faces of those unknown
)

strangers, if any strangers showed up. Not three weeks later Carol Gerber had made her comment about wondering sometimes if Ted was on the run from something.

“How many guys are there?” he asked.

“Three, five, perhaps more by now.” Ted shrugged. “You'll know them by their long yellow coats and olive skin . . . although that darkish skin is just a disguise.”

“What . . . you mean like Man-Tan, or something?”

“I suppose, yes. If they're driving, you'll know them by their cars.”

“What makes? What models?” Bobby felt like Darren McGavin on
Mike Hammer
and warned himself not to get carried away. This wasn't TV. Still, it was exciting.

Ted was shaking his head. “I have no idea. But you'll know just the same, because their cars will be like their yellow coats and sharp shoes and the greasy perfumed stuff they use to slick back their hair: loud and vulgar.”

“Low,” Bobby said—it was not quite a question.

“Low,” Ted repeated, and nodded emphatically. He sipped rootbeer, looked away toward the sound of the eternally barking Bowser . . . and remained that way for several moments, like a toy with a broken spring or a machine that has run out of gas. “They sense me,” he said. “And I sense them, as well. Ah, what a world.”

“What do they want?”

Ted turned back to him, appearing startled. It was as if he had forgotten Bobby was there . . . or had forgotten for a moment just who Bobby was. Then he smiled and reached out and put his hand over Bobby's. It was big and warm and comforting; a man's hand. At the feel of it Bobby's half-hearted reservations disappeared.

“A certain something I happen to have,” Ted said. “Let's leave it at that.”

“They're not cops, are they? Or government guys? Or—”

“Are you asking if I'm one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted, or a communist agent like on
I Led Three Lives
? A bad guy?”

“I know you're not a bad guy,” Bobby said, but the flush mounting into his cheeks suggested otherwise. Not that what he thought changed much. You could like or even love a bad guy; even Hitler had a mother, his own mom liked to say.

“I'm not a bad guy. Never robbed a bank or stole a military secret. I've spent too much of my life reading books and scamped on my share of fines—if there were Library Police, I'm afraid they'd be after me—but I'm not a bad guy like the ones you see on television.”

“The men in yellow coats are, though.”

Ted nodded. “Bad through and through. And, as I say, dangerous.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Many times, but not here. And the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that you won't, either. All I ask is that you keep an eye out for them. Could you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Bobby? Is there a problem?”

“No.” Yet something nagged at him for a moment—not a connection, only a momentary sense of groping toward one.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Now, here is the question: could you in good conscience—in
fair
conscience, at least—neglect to mention this part of your duty to your mother?”

“Yes,” Bobby said at once, although he understood doing such a thing would mark a large change in his life . . . and would be risky. He was more than a little afraid of his mom, and this fear was only partly caused by how angry she could get and how long she could bear a grudge. Mostly it grew from an unhappy sense of being loved only a little, and needing to protect what love there was. But he liked Ted . . . and he had loved the feeling of Ted's hand lying over his own, the warm roughness of the big palm, the touch of the fingers, thickened almost into knots at the joints. And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out.

“You're really sure?”

If you want to learn to lie, Bobby-O, I suppose leaving things out is as good a place to start as any
, an interior voice whispered. Bobby ignored it. “Yes,” he said,
“really sure. Ted . . . are these guys just dangerous to you or to anybody?” He was thinking of his mom, but he was also thinking of himself.

“To me they could be very dangerous indeed. To other people—
most
other people—probably not. Do you want to know a funny thing?”

“Sure.”

“The majority of people don't even see them unless they're very, very close. It's almost as if they have the power to cloud men's minds, like The Shadow on that old radio program.”

“Do you mean they're . . . well . . .” He supposed
supernatural
was the word he wasn't quite able to say.

“No, no, not at all.” Waving his question away before it could be fully articulated. Lying in bed that night and sleepless for longer than usual, Bobby thought that Ted had almost been afraid for it to be spoken aloud. “There are lots of people, quite ordinary ones, we don't see. The waitress walking home from work with her head down and her restaurant shoes in a paper bag. Old fellows out for their afternoon walks in the park. Teenage girls with their hair in rollers and their transistor radios playing Peter Tripp's countdown. But children see them. Children see them all. And Bobby, you are still a child.”

“These guys don't sound exactly easy to miss.”

“The coats, you mean. The shoes. The loud cars. But those are the very things which cause some people—many people, actually—to turn away. To erect little roadblocks between the eye and the brain. In any case, I won't have you taking chances. If you do see the men in the yellow coats,
don't approach them
. Don't speak to them even if they should speak to you.
I can't think why they would, I don't believe they would even see you—just as most people don't really see them—but there are plenty of things I don't know about them. Now tell me what I just said. Repeat it back. It's important.”

“Don't approach them and don't speak to them.”

“Even if they speak to you.” Rather impatiently.

“Even if they speak to me, right. What
should
I do?”

“Come back here and tell me they're about and where you saw them. Walk until you're certain you're out of their sight, then run. Run like the wind. Run like hell was after you.”

“And what will you do?” Bobby asked, but of course he knew. Maybe he wasn't as sharp as Carol, but he wasn't a complete dodo, either. “You'll go away, won't you?”

Ted Brautigan shrugged and finished his glass of rootbeer without meeting Bobby's eyes. “I'll decide when that time comes.
If
it comes. If I'm lucky, the feelings I've had for the last few days—my sense of these men—will go away.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Indeed it has. Now why don't we talk of more pleasant things?”

For the next half an hour they discussed baseball, then music (Bobby was startled to discover Ted not only knew the music of Elvis Presley but actually liked some of it), then Bobby's hopes and fears concerning the seventh grade in September. All this was pleasant enough, but behind each topic Bobby sensed the lurk of the low men. The low men were here in Ted's third-floor room like peculiar shadows which cannot quite be seen.

It wasn't until Bobby was getting ready to leave that Ted raised the subject of them again. “There are things you should look for,” he said. “Signs that my . . . my old friends are about.”

“What are they?”

“On your travels around town, keep an eye out for lost-pet posters on walls, in shop windows, stapled to telephone poles on residential streets. ‘Lost, a gray tabby cat with black ears, a white bib, and a crooked tail. Call IRoquois 7-7661.' ‘Lost, a small mongrel dog, part beagle, answers to the name of Trixie, loves children, ours want her to come home. Call IRoquois 7-0984 or bring to 77 Peabody Street.' That sort of thing.”

“What are you saying? Jeepers, are you saying they kill people's
pets?
Do you think  . . .”

“I think many of those animals don't exist at all,” Ted said. He sounded weary and unhappy. “Even when there is a small, poorly reproduced photograph, I think most are pure fiction. I think such posters are a form of communication, although why the men who put them up shouldn't just go into the Colony Diner and do their communicating over pot roast and mashed potatoes I don't know.

“Where does your mother shop, Bobby?”

“Total Grocery. It's right next door to Mr. Biderman's real-estate agency.”

“And do you go with her?”

“Sometimes.” When he was younger he met her there every Friday, reading a
TV Guide
from the magazine rack until she showed up, loving Friday afternoons because it was the start of the weekend, because Mom let him push the cart and he always pretended it was a racing car, because he loved
her
.
But he didn't tell Ted any of this. It was ancient history. Hell, he'd only been eight.

“Look on the bulletin board every supermarket puts up by the checkout registers,” Ted said. “On it you'll see a number of little hand-printed notices that say things like
CAR FOR SALE BY OWNER.
Look for any such notices that have been thumbtacked to the board upside down. Is there another supermarket in town?”

“There's the A&P, down by the railroad overpass. My mom doesn't go there. She says the butcher's always giving her the glad-eye.”