Hearts In Atlantis

Low Men in Yellow Coats

I. A BOY AND HIS MOTHER. BOBBY’S BIRTHDAY. THE NEW ROOMER. OF TIME AND STRANGERS.

Bobby Garfield’s father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so. Randall Garfield was spared this extremity by dying of a heart attack at thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed his last on the kitchen floor of someone else’s house. The potential buyer was in the living room, trying to call an ambulance on a discon-nected phone, when Bobby’s dad passed away. At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him and then kissing his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had been his dad. SADLY MISSED, it said on Randall Garfield’s gravestone, but his mom never seemed all that sad, and as for Bobby himself . . . well, how could you miss a guy you could hardly remember?

Eight years after his father’s death, Bobby fell violently in love with the twenty-six-inch Schwinn in the window of the Harwich Western Auto. He hinted to his mother about the Schwinn in every way he knew, and finally pointed it out to her one night when they were walking home from the movies (the show had been The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which Bobby didn’t understand but liked anyway, especially the part where Dorothy McGuire flopped back in a chair and showed off her long legs). As they passed the hardware store, Bobby mentioned casually that the bike in the window would sure make a great eleventh-birthday present for some lucky kid.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “I can’t afford a bike for your birthday. Your father didn’t exactly leave us well off, you know.”

Although Randall had been dead ever since Truman was President and now Eisenhower was almost done with his eight-year cruise, Your father didn’t exactly leave us well off was still his mother’s most common response to anything Bobby suggested which might entail an expenditure of more than a dollar. Usually the comment was accompanied by a reproachful look, as if the man had run off rather than died.

No bike for his birthday. Bobby pondered this glumly on their walk home, his pleasure at the strange, muddled movie they had seen mostly gone. He didn’t argue with his mother, or try to coax her— that would bring on a counterattack, and when Liz Garfield counter-attacked she took no prisoners—but he brooded on the lost bike . . . and the lost father. Sometimes he almost hated his father. Sometimes all that kept him from doing so was the sense, unanchored but very strong, that his mother wanted him to. As they reached Common-wealth Park and walked along the side of it—two blocks up they would turn left onto Broad Street, where they lived—he went against his usual misgivings and asked a question about Randall Garfield.

“Didn’t he leave anything, Mom? Anything at all?” A week or two before, he’d read a Nancy Drew mystery where some poor kid’s inheritance had been hidden behind an old clock in an abandoned mansion. Bobby didn’t really think his father had left gold coins or rare stamps stashed someplace, but if there was something, maybe they could sell it in Bridgeport. Possibly at one of the hockshops. Bobby didn’t know exactly how hocking things worked, but he knew what the shops looked like—they had three gold balls hanging out front. And he was sure the hockshop guys would be happy to help them. Of course it was just a kid’s dream, but Carol Gerber up the street had a whole set of dolls her father, who was in the Navy, had sent from overseas. If fathers gave things—which they did—it stood to reason that fathers sometimes left things.

When Bobby asked the question, they were passing one of the streetlamps which ran along this side of Commonwealth Park, and Bobby saw his mother’s mouth change as it always did when he ven-tured a question about his late father. The change made him think of a purse she had: when you pulled on the drawstrings, the hole at the top got smaller.

“I’ll tell you what he left,” she said as they started up Broad Street Hill. Bobby already wished he hadn’t asked, but of course it was too late now. Once you got her started, you couldn’t get her stopped, that was the thing. “He left a life insurance policy which lapsed the year before he died. Little did I know that until he was gone and everyone— including the undertaker—wanted their little piece of what I didn’t have. He also left a large stack of unpaid bills, which I have now pretty much taken care of—people have been very understanding of my sit-uation, Mr. Biderman in particular, and I’ll never say they haven’t been.”

All this was old stuff, as boring as it was bitter, but then she told Bobby something new. “Your father,” she said as they approached the apartment house which stood halfway up Broad Street Hill, “never met an inside straight he didn’t like.”

“What’s an inside straight, Mom?”

“Never mind. But I’ll tell you one thing, Bobby-O: you don’t ever want to let me catch you playing cards for money. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.”

Bobby wanted to enquire further, but knew better; more ques-tions were apt to set off a tirade. It occurred to him that perhaps the movie, which had been about unhappy husbands and wives, had upset her in some way he could not, as a mere kid, understand. He would ask his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was poker, but wasn’t completely sure.

“There are places in Bridgeport that take men’s money,” she said as they neared the apartment house where they lived. “Foolish men go to them. Foolish men make messes, and it’s usually the women of the world that have to clean them up later on. Well . . .”

Bobby knew what was coming next; it was his mother’s all-time favorite.

“Life isn’t fair,” said Liz Garfield as she took out her housekey and prepared to unlock the door of 149 Broad Street in the town of Har-wich, Connecticut. It was April of 1960, the night breathed spring perfume, and standing beside her was a skinny boy with his dead father’s risky red hair. She hardly ever touched his hair; on the infre-quent occasions when she caressed him, it was usually his arm or his cheek which she touched.

“Life isn’t fair,” she repeated. She opened the door and they went in.

It was true that his mother had not been treated like a princess, and it was certainly too bad that her husband had expired on a linoleum floor in an empty house at the age of thirty-six, but Bobby sometimes thought that things could have been worse. There might have been two kids instead of just one, for instance. Or three. Hell, even four.

Or suppose she had to work some really hard job to support the two of them? Sully’s mom worked at the Tip-Top Bakery downtown, and during the weeks when she had to light the ovens, Sully-John and his two older brothers hardly even saw her. Also Bobby had observed the women who came filing out of the Peerless Shoe Com-pany when the three o’clock whistle blew (he himself got out of school at two-thirty), women who all seemed way too skinny or way too fat, women with pale faces and fingers stained a dreadful old-blood color, women with downcast eyes who carried their work shoes and pants in Total Grocery shopping bags. Last fall he’d seen men and women picking apples outside of town when he went to a church fair with Mrs. Gerber and Carol and little Ian (who Carol always called Ian-the-Snot). When he asked about them Mrs. Gerber said they were migrants, just like some kinds of birds—always on the move, picking whatever crops had just come ripe. Bobby’s mother could have been one of those, but she wasn’t.

What she was was Mr. Donald Biderman’s secretary at Home Town Real Estate, the company Bobby’s dad had been working for when he had his heart attack. Bobby guessed she might first have gotten the job because Donald Biderman liked Randall and felt sorry for her—widowed with a son barely out of diapers—but she was good at it and worked hard. Quite often she worked late. Bobby had been with his mother and Mr. Biderman together on a couple of occasions—the company picnic was the one he remembered most clearly, but there had also been the time Mr. Biderman had driven them to the dentist’s in Bridgeport when Bobby had gotten a tooth knocked out during a recess game—and the two grownups had a way of looking at each other. Sometimes Mr. Biderman called her on the phone at night, and during those conversations she called him Don. But “Don” was old and Bobby didn’t think about him much.

Bobby wasn’t exactly sure what his mom did during her days (and her evenings) at the office, but he bet it beat making shoes or picking apples or lighting the Tip-Top Bakery ovens at four-thirty in the morning. Bobby bet it beat those jobs all to heck and gone. Also, when it came to his mom, if you asked about certain stuff you were asking for trouble. If you asked, for instance, how come she could afford three new dresses from Sears, one of them silk, but not three monthly payments of $11.50 on the Schwinn in the Western Auto window (it was red and silver, and just looking at it made Bobby’s gut cramp with longing). Ask about stuff like that and you were ask-ing for real trouble.

Bobby didn’t. He simply set out to earn the price of the bike him-self. It would take him until the fall, perhaps even until the winter, and that particular model might be gone from the Western Auto’s window by then, but he would keep at it. You had to keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. Life wasn’t easy, and life wasn’t fair.

When Bobby’s eleventh birthday rolled around on the last Tuesday of April, his mom gave him a small flat package wrapped in silver paper. Inside was an orange library card. An adult library card. Goodbye Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Don Winslow of the Navy. Hello to all the rest of it, stories as full of mysterious muddled passion as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Not to mention bloody daggers in tower rooms. (There were mysteries and tower rooms in the stories about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but precious little blood and never any passion.)

“Just remember that Mrs. Kelton on the desk is a friend of mine,” Mom said. She spoke in her accustomed dry tone of warning, but she was pleased by his pleasure—she could see it. “If you try to borrow anything racy like Peyton Place or Kings Row, I’ll find out.”

Bobby smiled. He knew she would.

“If it’s that other one, Miss Busybody, and she asks what you’re doing with an orange card, you tell her to turn it over. I’ve put writ-ten permission over my signature.”

“Thanks, Mom. This is swell.”

She smiled, bent, and put a quick dry swipe of the lips on his cheek, gone almost before it was there. “I’m glad you’re happy. If I get home early enough, we’ll go to the Colony for fried clams and ice cream. You’ll have to wait for the weekend for your cake; I don’t have time to bake until then. Now put on your coat and get moving, sonnyboy. You’ll be late for school.”

They went down the stairs and out onto the porch together. There was a Town Taxi at the curb. A man in a poplin jacket was leaning in the passenger window, paying the driver. Behind him was a little cluster of luggage and paper bags, the kind with handles.

“That must be the man who just rented the room on the third floor,” Liz said. Her mouth had done its shrinking trick again. She stood on the top step of the porch, appraising the man’s narrow fanny, which poked toward them as he finished his business with the taxi driver. “I don’t trust people who move their things in paper bags. To me a person’s things in a paper sack just looks slutty.”

“He has suitcases, too,” Bobby said, but he didn’t need his mother to point out that the new tenant’s three little cases weren’t such of a much. None matched; all looked as if they had been kicked here from California by someone in a bad mood.

Bobby and his mom walked down the cement path. The Town Taxi pulled away. T he man in the poplin jacket turned around. To Bobby, people fell into three broad categories: kids, grownups, and old folks. Old folks were grownups with white hair. The new tenant was of this third sort. His face was thin and tired-looking, not wrin-kled (except around his faded blue eyes) but deeply lined. His white hair was baby-fine and receding from a liverspotted brow. He was tall and stooped-over in a way that made Bobby think of Boris Karloff in the Shock Theater movies they showed Friday nights at 11:30 on WPIX. Beneath the poplin jacket were cheap workingman’s clothes that looked too big for him. On his feet were scuffed cordovan shoes.

“Hello, folks,” he said, and smiled with what looked like an effort. “My name’s Theodore Brautigan. I guess I’m going to live here awhile.”

He held out his hand to Bobby’s mother, who touched it just briefly. “I’m Elizabeth Garfield. This is my son, Robert. You’ll have to pardon us, Mr. Brattigan—”

“It’s Brautigan, ma’am, but I’d be happy if you and your boy would just call me Ted.”

“Yes, well, Robert’s late for school and I’m late for work. Nice to meet you, Mr. Brattigan. Hurry on, Bobby. Tempus fugit.”

She began walking downhill toward town; Bobby began walking uphill (and at a slower pace) toward Harwich Elementary, on Asher Avenue. Three or four steps into this journey he stopped and looked back. He felt that his mom had been rude to Mr. Brautigan, that she had acted stuck-up. Being stuck-up was the worst of vices in his little circle of friends. Carol loathed a stuck-up person; so did Sully-John. Mr. Brautigan would probably be halfway up the walk by now, but if he wasn’t, Bobby wanted to give him a smile so he’d know at least one member of the Garfield family wasn’t stuck-up.

His mother had also stopped and was also looking back. Not because she wanted another look at Mr. Brautigan; that idea never crossed Bobby’s mind. No, it was her son she had looked back at. She’d known he was going to turn around before Bobby knew it him-self, and at this he felt a sudden darkening in his normally bright nature. She sometimes said it would be a snowy day in Sarasota before Bobby could put one over on her, and he supposed she was right about that. How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway? Twenty? T hirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy in the head?

Mr. Brautigan hadn’t started up the walk. He stood at its sidewalk end with a suitcase in each hand and the third one under his right arm (the three paper bags he had moved onto the grass of 149 Broad), more bent than ever under this weight. He was right between them, like a tollgate or something.

Liz Garfield’s eyes flew past him to her son’s. Go, they said. Don’t say a word. He’s new, a man from anywhere or nowhere, and he’s arrived here with half his things in shopping bags. Don’t say a word, Bobby, just go.

But he wouldn’t. Perhaps because he had gotten a library card instead of a bike for his birthday. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Brautigan,” Bobby said. “Hope you like it here. Bye.”

“Have a good day at school, son,” Mr. Brautigan said. “Learn a lot. Your mother’s right—tempus fugit.”

Bobby looked at his mother to see if his small rebellion might be forgiven in light of this equally small flattery, but Mom’s mouth was ungiving. She turned and started down the hill without another word. Bobby went on his own way, glad he had spoken to the stranger even if his mother later made him regret it.

As he approached Carol Gerber’s house, he took out the orange library card and looked at it. It wasn’t a twenty-six-inch Schwinn, but it was still pretty good. Great, actually. A whole world of books to explore, and so what if it had only cost two or three rocks? Didn’t they say it was the thought that counted?

Well . . . it was what his mom said, anyway.

He turned the card over. Written on the back in her strong hand was this message: “To whom it may concern: This is my son’s library card. He has my permission to take out three books a week from the adult section of the Harwich Public Library.” It was signed Eliza-beth Penrose Garfield.

Beneath her name, like a P.S., she had added this: Robert will be responsible for his own overdue fines.

“Birthday boy!” Carol Gerber cried, startling him, and rushed out from behind a tree where she had been lying in wait. She threw her arms around his neck and smacked him hard on the cheek. Bobby blushed, looking around to see if anyone was watching—God, it was hard enough to be friends with a girl without surprise kisses—but it was okay. The usual morning flood of students was moving school-ward along Asher Avenue at the top of the hill, but down here they were alone.

Bobby scrubbed at his cheek.

“Come on, you liked it,” she said, laughing.

“Did not,” said Bobby, although he had.

“What’d you get for your birthday?”

“A library card,” Bobby said, and showed her. “An adult library card.”

“Cool!” Was that sympathy he saw in her eyes? Probably not. And so what if it was? “Here. For you.” She gave him a Hallmark enve-lope with his name printed on the front. She had also stuck on some hearts and teddy bears.

Bobby opened the envelope with mild trepidation, reminding himself that he could tuck the card deep into the back pocket of his chinos if it was gushy.

It wasn’t, though. Maybe a little bit on the baby side (a kid in a Stetson on a horse, HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUCKAROO in letters that were supposed to look like wood on the inside), but not gushy. Love, Carol was a little gushy, but of course she was a girl, what could you do?

“Thanks.”

“It’s sort of a baby card, I know, but the others were even worse,” Carol said matter-of-factly. A little farther up the hill Sully-John was waiting for them, working his Bo-lo Bouncer for all it was worth, going under his right arm, going under his left arm, going behind his back. He didn’t try going between his legs anymore; he’d tried it once in the schoolyard and rapped himself a good one in the nuts. Sully had screamed. Bobby and a couple of other kids had laughed until they cried. Carol and three of her girlfriends had rushed over to ask what was wrong, and the boys all said nothing—Sully-John said the same, although he’d been pale and almost crying. Boys are boogers, Carol had said on that occasion, but Bobby didn’t believe she really thought so. She wouldn’t have jumped out and given him that kiss if she did, and it had been a good kiss, a smackeroo. Better than the one his mother had given him, actually.

“It’s not a baby card,” he said.

“No, but it almost is,” she said. “I thought about getting you a grownup card, but man, they are gushy.”

“I know,” Bobby said.

“Are you going to be a gushy adult, Bobby?”

“I hope not,” he said. “Are you?”

“No. I’m going to be like my mom’s friend Rionda.”

“Rionda’s pretty fat,” Bobby said doubtfully.

“Yeah, but she’s cool. I’m going to go for the cool without the fat.”

“There’s a new guy moving into our building. The room on the third floor. My mom says it’s really hot up there.”

“Yeah? What’s he like?” She giggled. “Is he ushy-gushy?”

“He’s old,” Bobby said, then paused to think. “But he had an interesting face. My mom didn’t like him on sight because he had some of his stuff in shopping bags.”

Sully-John joined them. “Happy birthday, you bastard,” he said, and clapped Bobby on the back. Bastard was Sully-John’s current favorite word; Carol’s was cool; Bobby was currently between favorite words, although he thought ripshit had a certain ring to it.

“If you swear, I won’t walk with you,” Carol said.

“Okay,” Sully-John said companionably. Carol was a fluffy blonde who looked like a Bobbsey Twin after some growing up; John Sulli-van was tall, black-haired, and green-eyed. A Joe Hardy kind of boy. Bobby Garfield walked between them, his momentary depression forgotten. It was his birthday and he was with his friends and life was good. He tucked Carol’s birthday card into his back pocket and his new library card down deep in his front pocket, where it could not fall out or be stolen. Carol started to skip. Sully-John told her to stop.

“Why?” Carol asked. “I like to skip.”

“I like to say bastard, but I don’t if you ask me,” Sully-John replied reasonably.

Carol looked at Bobby.

“Skipping—at least without a rope—is a little on the baby side, Carol,” Bobby said apologetically, then shrugged. “But you can if you want. We don’t mind, do we, S-J?”

“Nope,” Sully-John said, and got going with the Bo-lo Bouncer again. Back to front, up to down, whap-whap-whap.

Carol didn’t skip. She walked between them and pretended she was Bobby Garfield’s girlfriend, that Bobby had a driver’s license and a Buick and they were going to Bridgeport to see the WKBW Rock and Roll Extravaganza. She thought Bobby was extremely cool. The coolest thing about him was that he didn’t know it.

*

Bobby got home from school at three o’clock. He could have been there sooner, but picking up returnable bottles was part of his Get-a-Bike-by-Thanksgiving campaign, and he detoured through the brushy area just off Asher Avenue looking for them. He found three Rheingolds and a Nehi. Not much, but hey, eight cents was eight cents. “It all mounts up” was another of his mom’s sayings.

Bobby washed his hands (a couple of those bottles had been pretty scurgy), got a snack out of the icebox, read a couple of old Superman comics, got another snack out of the icebox, then watched American Bandstand. He called Carol to tell her Bobby Darin was going to be on—she thought Bobby Darin was deeply cool, especially the way he snapped his fingers when he sang “Queen of the Hop”—but she already knew. She was watching with three or four of her numbskull girlfriends; they all giggled pretty much nonstop in the background. The sound made Bobby think of birds in a petshop. On TV, Dick Clark was currently showing how much pimple-grease just one Stri-Dex Medicated Pad could sop up.

Mom called at four o’clock. Mr. Biderman needed her to work late, she said. She was sorry, but birthday supper at the Colony was off. There was leftover beef stew in the fridge; he could have that and she would be home by eight to tuck him in. And for heaven’s sake, Bobby, remember to turn off the gas-ring when you’re done with the stove.

Bobby returned to the television feeling disappointed but not really surprised. On Bandstand, Dick was now announcing the Rate-a-Record panel. Bobby thought the guy in the middle looked as if he could use a lifetime supply of Stri-Dex pads.

He reached into his front pocket and drew out the new orange library card. His mood began to brighten again. He didn’t need to sit here in front of the TV with a stack of old comic-books if he didn’t want to. He could go down to the library and break in his new card—his new adult card. Miss Busybody would be on the desk, only her real name was Miss Harrington and Bobby thought she was beautiful. She wore perfume. He could always smell it on her skin and in her hair, faint and sweet, like a good memory. And although Sully-John would be at his trombone lesson right now, after the library Bobby could go up his house, maybe play some pass.

Also, he thought, I can take those bottles to Spicer’s—I’ve got a bike to earn this summer.

All at once, life seemed very full.

Sully’s mom invited Bobby to stay for supper, but he told her no thanks, I better get home. He would much have preferred Mrs. Sul-livan’s pot roast and crispy oven potatoes to what was waiting for him back at the apartment, but he knew that one of the first things his mother would do when she got back from the office was check in the fridge and see if the Tupperware with the leftover stew inside was gone. If it wasn’t, she would ask Bobby what he’d had for supper. She would be calm about this question, even offhand. If he told her he’d eaten at Sully-John’s she would nod, ask him what they’d had and if there had been dessert, also if he’d thanked Mrs. Sullivan; she might even sit on the couch with him and share a bowl of ice cream while they watched Sugarfoot on TV. Everything would be fine . . . except it wouldn’t be. Eventually there would be a payback. It might not come for a day or two, even a week, but it would come. Bobby knew that almost without knowing he knew it. She undoubtedly did have to work late, but eating leftover stew by himself on his birthday was also punishment for talking to the new tenant when he wasn’t sup-posed to. If he tried to duck that punishment, it would mount up just like money in a savings account.

When Bobby came back from Sully-John’s it was quarter past six and getting dark. He had two new books to read, a Perry Mason called The Case of the Velvet Claws and a science-fiction novel by Clifford Simak called Ring Around the Sun. Both looked totally rip-shit, and Miss Harrington hadn’t given him a hard time at all. On the contrary: she told him he was reading above his level and to keep it up.

Walking home from S-J’s, Bobby made up a story where he and Miss Harrington were on a cruise-boat that sank. They were the only two survivors, saved from drowning by finding a life preserver marked S.S. LUSITANIC. They washed up on a little island with palm trees and jungles and a volcano, and as they lay on the beach Miss Harrington was shivering and saying she was cold, so cold, couldn’t he please hold her and warm her up, which he of course could and did, my pleasure, Miss Harrington, and then the natives came out of the jungle and at first they seemed friendly but it turned out they were cannibals who lived on the slopes of the volcano and killed their vic-tims in a clearing ringed with skulls, so things looked bad but just as he and Miss Harrington were pulled toward the cooking pot the volcano started to rumble and—

“Hello, Robert.”

Bobby looked up, even more startled than he’d been when Carol Gerber raced out from behind the tree to put a birthday smackeroo on his cheek. It was the new man in the house. He was sitting on the top porch step and smoking a cigarette. He had exchanged his old scuffed shoes for a pair of old scuffed slippers and had taken off his poplin jacket—the evening was warm. He looked at home, Bobby thought.

“Oh, Mr. Brautigan. Hi.”

“I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t—”

“I think I did. You were a thousand miles away. And it’s Ted. Please.”

“Okay.” But Bobby didn’t know if he could stick to Ted. Calling a grownup (especially an old grownup) by his first name went against not only his mother’s teaching but his own inclination.

“Was school good? You learned new things?”

“Yeah, fine.” Bobby shifted from foot to foot; swapped his new books from hand to hand.

“Would you sit with me a minute?”

“Sure, but I can’t for long. Stuff to do, you know.” Supper to do, mostly—the leftover stew had grown quite attractive in his mind by now.

“Absolutely. Things to do and tempus fugit.”

As Bobby sat down next to Mr. Brautigan—Ted—on the wide porch step, smelling the aroma of his Chesterfield, he thought he had never seen a man who looked as tired as this one. It couldn’t be the moving in, could it? How worn out could you get when all you had to move in were three little suitcases and three carryhandle shopping bags? Bobby supposed there might be men coming later on with stuff in a truck, but he didn’t really think so. It was just a room—a big one, but still just a single room with a kitchen on one side and everything else on the other. He and Sully-John had gone up there and looked around after old Miss Sidley had her stroke and went to live with her daughter.

“Tempus fugit means time flies,” Bobby said. “Mom says it a lot. She also says time and tide wait for no man and time heals all wounds.”

“Your mother is a woman of many sayings, is she?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, and suddenly the idea of all those sayings made him tired. “Many sayings.”

“Ben Jonson called time the old bald cheater,” Ted Brautigan said, drawing deeply on his cigarette and then exhaling twin streams through his nose. “And Boris Pasternak said we are time’s captives, the hostages of eternity.”

Bobby looked at him in fascination, his empty belly temporarily forgotten. He loved the idea of time as an old bald cheater—it was absolutely and completely right, although he couldn’t have said why . . . and didn’t that very inability to say why somehow add to the coolness? It was like a thing inside an egg, or a shadow behind peb-bled glass.

“Who’s Ben Jonson?”

“An Englishman, dead these many years,” Mr. Brautigan said. “Self-centered and foolish about money, by all accounts; prone to flatulence as well. But—”

“What’s that? Flatulence?”

Ted stuck his tongue between his lips and made a brief but very realistic farting sound. Bobby put his hands to his mouth and gig-gled into his cupped fingers.

“Kids think farts are funny,” Ted Brautigan said, nodding. “Yeah. To a man my age, though, they’re just part of life’s increasingly strange business. Ben Jonson said a good many wise things between farts, by the way. Not so many as Dr. Johnson—Samuel Johnson, that would be—but still a good many.”

“And Boris . . .”

“Pasternak. A Russian,” Mr. Brautigan said dismissively. “Of no account, I think. May I see your books?”

Bobby handed them over. Mr. Brautigan (Ted, he reminded him-self, you’re supposed to call him Ted) passed the Perry Mason back after a cursory glance at the title. The Clifford Simak novel he held longer, at first squinting at the cover through the curls of cigarette smoke that rose past his eyes, then paging through it. He nodded as he did so.

“I have read this one,” he said. “I had a lot of time to read previous to coming here.”

“Yeah?” Bobby kindled. “Is it good?”

“One of his best,” Mr. Brautigan—Ted—replied. He looked side-ways at Bobby, one eye open, the other still squinted shut against the smoke. It gave him a look that was at once wise and mysterious, like a not-quite-trustworthy character in a detective movie. “But are you sure you can read this? You can’t be much more than twelve.”

“I’m eleven,” Bobby said. He was delighted that Ted thought he might be as old as twelve. “Eleven today. I can read it. I won’t be able to understand it all, but if it’s a good story, I’ll like it.”

“Your birthday!” Ted said, looking impressed. He took a final drag on his cigarette, then flicked it away. It hit the cement walk and fountained sparks. “Happy birthday dear Robert, happy birthday to you!”

“Thanks. Only I like Bobby a lot better.”

“Bobby, then. Are you going out to celebrate?”

“Nah, my mom’s got to work late.”

“Would you like to come up to my little place? I don’t have much, but I know how to open a can. Also, I might have a pastry—”

“Thanks, but Mom left me some stuff. I should eat that.”

“I understand.” And, wonder of wonders, he looked as if he actu-ally did. Ted returned Bobby’s copy of Ring Around the Sun. “In this book,” he said, “Mr. Simak postulates the idea that there are a num-ber of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths, parallel Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun. A fascinating idea.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. He knew about parallel worlds from other books. From the comics, as well.

Ted Brautigan was now looking at him in a thoughtful, specula-tive way.

“What?” Bobby asked, feeling suddenly self-conscious. See some-thing green? his mother might have said.

For a moment he thought Ted wasn’t going to answer—he seemed to have fallen into some deep and dazing train of thought. Then he gave himself a little shake and sat up straighter. “Nothing,” he said. “I have a little idea. Perhaps you’d like to earn some extra money? Not that I have much, but—”

“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 lit-tle 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 cho-sen.” 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, uri-nating 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 look-ing 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 apart-ment, 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 street-lights 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 mad-house, 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 pla-catory, and Bobby was satisfied. The day had come to a very accept-able 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.

II. DOUBTS ABOUT TED. BOOKS ARE LIKE PUMPS. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. SULLY WINS A PRIZE. BOBBY GETS A JOB. SIGNS OF THE LOW MEN.

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 Hos-pital 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 had-n’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 sin-gle 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 Certifi-cate, 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.

“My mom says she’s trashy,” Carol said.

“If she’s trash, I’d love to be the trashman,” S-J said, and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho.

“Do you think she’s trashy?” Bobby asked Carol.

“I’m not sure what that means, even.”

As they passed out from under the marquee (from within her glass ticket-booth beside the doors, Mrs. Godlow—known to the neigh-borhood kids as Mrs. Godzilla—watched them suspiciously), Carol looked back over her shoulder at Brigitte Bardot in her towel. Her expression was hard to read. Curiosity? Bobby couldn’t tell. “But she’s pretty, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And you’d have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel. That’s what I think, anyway.”

Sully-John had no interest in la femme Brigitte now that she was behind them. “Where’d Ted come from, Bobby?”

“I don’t know. He never talks about that.”

Sully-John nodded as if he expected just that answer, and threw his Bo-lo Bouncer back into gear. Up and down, all around, whapwhap-whap.

In May Bobby’s thoughts began turning to summer vacation. There was really nothing in the world better than what Sully called “the Big Vac.” He would spend long hours goofing with his friends, both on Broad Street and down at Sterling House on the other side of the park—they had lots of good things to do in the summer at Sterling House, including baseball and weekly trips to Patagonia Beach in West Haven—and he would also have plenty of time for himself. Time to read, of course, but what he really wanted to do with some of that time was find a part-time job. He had a little over seven rocks in a jar marked BIKE FUND, and seven rocks was a start . . . but not what you’d call a great start. At this rate Nixon would have been President for two years before he was riding to school.

On one of these vacation’s-almost-here days, Ted gave him a paperback book. “Remember I told you that some books have both a good story and good writing?” he asked. “This is one of that breed. A belated birthday present from a new friend. At least, I hope I am your friend.”

“You are. Thanks a lot!” In spite of the enthusiasm in his voice, Bobby took the book a little doubtfully. He was accustomed to pocket books with bright, raucous covers and sexy come-on lines (“She hit the gutter . . . AND BOUNCED LOWER!”); this one had neither. The cover was mostly white. In one corner of it was sketched— barely sketched—a group of boys standing in a circle. The name of the book was Lord of the Flies. There was no come-on line above the title, not even a discreet one like “A story you will never forget.” All in all, it had a forbidding, unwelcoming look, suggesting that the story lying beneath the cover would be hard. Bobby had nothing in particular against hard books, as long as they were a part of one’s schoolwork. His view about reading for pleasure, however, was that such stories should be easy—that the writer should do everything except move your eyes back and forth for you. If not, how much plea-sure could there be in it?

He started to turn the book over. Ted gently put his hand on Bobby’s, stopping him. “Don’t,” he said. “As a personal favor to me, don’t.”

Bobby looked at him, not understanding.

“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.”

“But what if I don’t like it?”

Ted shrugged. “T hen don’t finish it. A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually. Do you go along with that?”

Bobby nodded.

“How long would you prime a water-pump and flail the handle if nothing came out?”

“Not too long, I guess.”

“This book is two hundred pages, give or take. You read the first ten per cent—twenty pages, that is, I know already your math isn’t as good as your reading—and if you don’t like it by then, if it isn’t giving more than it’s taking by then, put it aside.”

“I wish they’d let you do that in school,” Bobby said. He was thinking of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson which they were sup-posed to memorize. “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” it started. S-J called the poet Ralph Waldo Emerslop.

“School is different.” They were sitting at Ted’s kitchen table, looking out over the back yard, where everything was in bloom. On Colony Street, which was the next street over, Mrs. O’Hara’s dog Bowser barked its endless roop-roop-roop into the mild spring air. Ted was smoking a Chesterfield. “And speaking of school, don’t take this book there with you. There are things in it your teacher might not want you to read. There could be a brouhaha.”

“A what?”

“An uproar. And if you get in trouble at school, you get in trouble at home—this I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you. And your mother . . .” The hand not holding the cigarette made a little see-sawing gesture which Bobby understood at once. Your mother doesn’t trust me.

Bobby thought of Carol saying that maybe Ted was on the run from something, and remembered his mother saying Carol didn’t miss much.

“What’s in it that could get me in trouble?” He looked at Lord of the Flies with new fascination.

“Nothing to froth at the mouth about,” Ted said dryly. He crushed his cigarette out in a tin ashtray, went to his little refrigerator, and took out two bottles of pop. There was no beer or wine in there, just pop and a glass bottle of cream. “Some talk of putting a spear up a wild pig’s ass, I think that’s the worst. Still, there is a certain kind of grownup who can only see the trees and never the forest. Read the first twenty pages, Bobby. You’ll never look back. This I promise you.”

Ted set the pop down on the table and lifted the caps with his churchkey. Then he lifted his bottle and clinked it against Bobby’s. “To your new friends on the island.”

“What island?”

Ted Brautigan smiled and shot the last cigarette out of a crumpled pack. “You’ll find out,” he said.

Bobby did find out, and it didn’t take him twenty pages to also find out that Lord of the Flies was a hell of a book, maybe the best he’d ever read. Ten pages into it he was captivated; twenty pages and he was lost. He lived on the island with Ralph and Jack and Piggy and the littluns; he trembled at the Beast that turned out to be a rotting airplane pilot caught in his parachute; he watched first in dismay and then in horror as a bunch of harmless schoolboys descended into sav-agery, finally setting out to hunt down the only one of their number who had managed to remain halfway human.

He finished the book one Saturday the week before school ended for the year. When noon came and Bobby was still in his room—no friends over to play, no Saturday-morning cartoons, not even Merrie Melodies from ten to eleven—his mom looked in on him and told him to get off his bed, get his nose out of that book, and go on down to the park or something.

“Where’s Sully?” she asked.

“Dalhouse Square. There’s a school band concert.” Bobby looked at his mother in the doorway and the ordinary stuff around her with dazed, perplexed eyes. The world of the story had become so vivid to him that this real one now seemed false and drab.

“What about your girlfriend? Take her down to the park with you.”

“Carol’s not my girlfriend, Mom.”

“Well, whatever she is. Goodness sakes, Bobby, I wasn’t suggest-ing the two of you were going to run off and elope.”

“She and some other girls slept over Angie’s house last night. Carol says when they sleep over they stay up and hen-party practically all night long. I bet they’re still in bed, or eating breakfast for lunch.”

“Then go to the park by yourself. You’re making me nervous. With the TV off on Saturday morning I keep thinking you’re dead.” She came into his room and plucked the book out of his hands. Bobby watched with a kind of numb fascination as she thumbed through the pages, reading random snatches here and there. Suppose she spotted the part where the boys talked about sticking their spears up the wild pig’s ass (only they were English and said “arse,” which sounded even dirtier to Bobby)? What would she make of it? He didn’t know. All his life they had lived together, it had been just the two of them for most of it, and he still couldn’t predict how she’d react to any given situation.

“Is this the one Brattigan gave you?”

“Yeah.”

“As a birthday present?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it about?”

“Boys marooned on an island. Their ship gets sunk. I think it’s supposed to be after World War III or something. The guy who wrote it never says for sure.”

“So it’s science fiction.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. He felt a little giddy. He thought Lord of the Flies was about as far from Ring Around the Sun as you could get, but his mom hated science fiction, and if anything would stop her potentially dangerous thumbing, that would.

She handed the book back and walked over to his window.

“Bobby?” Not looking back at him, at least not at first. She was wearing an old shirt and her Saturday pants. The bright noonlight shone through the shirt; he could see her sides and noticed for the first time how thin she was, as if she was forgetting to eat or some-thing. “What, Mom?”

“Has Mr. Brattigan given you any other presents?”

“It’s Brautigan, Mom.”

She frowned at her reflection in the window . . . or more likely it was his reflection she was frowning at. “Don’t correct me, Bobby-O. Has he?”

Bobby considered. A few rootbeers, sometimes a tuna sandwich or a cruller from the bakery where Sully’s mom worked, but no pres-ents. Just the book, which was one of the best presents he had ever gotten. “Jeepers, no, why would he?”

“I don’t know. But then, I don’t know why a man you just met would give you a birthday present in the first place.” She sighed, folded her arms under her small sharp breasts, and went on looking out Bobby’s window. “He told me he used to work in a state job up in Hartford but now he’s retired. Is that what he told you?”

“Something like that.” In fact, Ted had never told Bobby anything about his working life, and asking had never crossed Bobby’s mind.

“What kind of state job? What department? Health and Welfare? Transportation? Office of the Comptroller?”

Bobby shook his head. What in heck was a comptroller?

“I bet it was education,” she said meditatively. “He talks like someone who used to be a teacher. Doesn’t he?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Does he have hobbies?”

“I don’t know.” There was reading, of course; two of the three bags which had so offended his mother were full of paperback books, most of which looked very hard.

The fact that Bobby knew nothing of the new man’s pastimes for some reason seemed to ease her mind. She shrugged, and when she spoke again it seemed to be to herself rather than to Bobby. “Shoot, it’s only a book. And a paperback, at that.”

“He said he might have a job for me, but so far he hasn’t come up with anything.”

She turned around fast. “Any job he offers you, any chores he asks you to do, you talk to me about it first. Got that?”

“Sure, got it.” Her intensity surprised him and made him a little uneasy.

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Big promise, Bobby.”

He dutifully crossed his heart and said, “I promise my mother in the name of God.”

That usually finished things, but this time she didn’t look satisfied.

“Has he ever . . . does he ever . . .” There she stopped, looking uncharacteristically flustered. Kids sometimes looked that way when Mrs. Bramwell sent them to the blackboard to pick the nouns and verbs out of a sentence and they couldn’t.

“Has he ever what, Mom?”

“Never mind!” she said crossly. “Get out of here, Bobby, go to the park or Sterling House, I’m tired of looking at you.”

Why’d you come in, then? he thought (but of course did not say). I wasn’t bothering you, Mom. I wasn’t bothering you.

Bobby tucked Lord of the Flies into his back pocket and headed for the door. He turned back when he got there. She was still at the window, but now she was watching him again. He never surprised love on her face at such moments; at best he might see a kind of spec-ulation, sometimes (but not always) affectionate.

“Hey Mom?” He was thinking of asking for fifty cents—half a rock. With that he could buy a soda and two hotdogs at the Colony Diner. He loved the Colony’s hotdogs, which came in toasted buns with potato chips and pickle slices on the side.

Her mouth did its tightening trick, and he knew this wasn’t his day for hotdogs. “Don’t ask, Bobby, don’t even think about it.” Don’t even think about it—one of her all-time faves. “I have a ton of bills this week, so get those dollar-signs out of your eyes.”

She didn’t have a ton of bills, though, that was the thing. Not this week she didn’t. Bobby had seen both the electric bill and the check for the rent in its envelope marked Mr. Monteleone last Wednesday. And she couldn’t claim he would soon need clothes because this was the end of the school-year, not the beginning. The only dough he’d asked for lately was five bucks for Sterling House—quarterly dues— and she had even been chintzy about that, although she knew it cov-ered swimming and Wolves and Lions Baseball, plus the insurance. If it had been anyone but his mom, he would have thought of this as cheapskate behavior. He couldn’t say anything about it to her, though; talking to her about money almost always turned into an argument, and disputing any part of her view on money matters, even in the most tiny particulars, was apt to send her into ranting hyster-ics. When she got like that she was scary.

Bobby smiled. “It’s okay, Mom.”

She smiled back and then nodded to the jar marked BIKE FUND. “Borrow a little from there, why don’t you? Treat yourself. I’ll never tell, and you can always put it back later.”

He held onto his smile, but only with an effort. How easily she said that, never thinking of how furious she’d be if Bobby suggested she borrow a little from the electric money, or the phone money, or what she set aside to buy her “business clothes,” just so he could get a couple of hotdogs and maybe a pie à la mode at the Colony. If he told her breezily that he’d never tell and she could always put it back later. Yeah, sure, and get his face smacked.

By the time he got to Commonwealth Park, Bobby’s resentment had faded and the word cheapskate had left his brain. It was a beautiful day and he had a terrific book to finish; how could you be resentful and pissed off with stuff like that going for you? He found a secluded bench and reopened Lord of the Flies. He had to finish it today, had to find out what happened.

The last forty pages took him an hour, and during that time he was oblivious to everything around him. When he finally closed the book, he saw he had a lapful of little white flowers. His hair was full of them, too—he’d been sitting unaware in a storm of apple-blossoms.

He brushed them away, looking toward the playground as he did. Kids were teetertottering and swinging and batting the tetherball around its pole. Laughing, chasing each other, rolling in the grass. Could kids like that ever wind up going naked and worshipping a rotting pig’s head? It was tempting to dismiss such ideas as the imag-inings of a grownup who didn’t like kids (there were lots who didn’t, Bobby knew), but then Bobby glanced into the sandbox and saw a little boy sitting there and wailing as if his heart would break while another, bigger kid sat beside him, unconcernedly playing with the Tonka truck he had yanked out of his friend’s hands.

And the book’s ending—happy or not? Crazy as such a thing would have seemed a month ago, Bobby couldn’t really tell. Never in his life had he read a book where he didn’t know if the ending was good or bad, happy or sad. Ted would know, though. He would ask Ted.

Bobby was still on the bench fifteen minutes later when Sully came bopping into the park and saw him. “Say there, you old bastard!” Sully exclaimed. “I went by your place and your mom said you were down here, or maybe at Sterling House. Finally finish that book?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it good?”

“Yeah.”

S-J shook his head. “I never met a book I really liked, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“How was the concert?”

Sully shrugged. “We blew til everyone went away, so I guess it was good for us, anyway. And guess who won the week at Camp Wini-winaia?” Camp Winnie was the YMCA’s co-ed camp on Lake George, up in the woods north of Storrs. Each year HAC—the Harwich Activities Committee—had a drawing and gave away a week there.

Bobby felt a stab of jealousy. “Don’t tell me.”

Sully-John grinned. “Yeah, man! Seventy names in the hat, sev-enty at least, and the one that bald old bastard Mr. Coughlin pulled out was John L. Sullivan, Junior, 93 Broad Street. My mother just about weewee’d her pants.”

“When do you go?”

“Two weeks after school lets out. Mom’s gonna try and get her week off from the bakery at the same time, so she can go see Gramma and Grampy in Wisconsin. She’s gonna take the Big Gray Dog.” The Big Vac was summer vacation; the Big Shew was Ed Sul-livan on Sunday night; the Big Gray Dog was, of course, a Grey-hound bus. The local depot was just up the street from the Asher Empire and the Colony Diner.

“Don’t you wish you could go to Wisconsin with her?” Bobby asked, feeling a perverse desire to spoil his friend’s happiness at his good fortune just a little.

“Sorta, but I’d rather go to camp and shoot arrows.” He slung an arm around Bobby’s shoulders. “I only wish you could come with me, you book-reading bastard.”

That made Bobby feel mean-spirited. He looked down at Lord of the Flies again and knew he would be rereading it soon. Perhaps as early as August, if things got boring (by August they usually did, as hard as that was to believe in May). Then he looked up at Sully-John, smiled, and put his arm around S-J’s shoulders. “Well, you’re a lucky duck,” he said.

“Just call me Donald,” Sully-John agreed.

They sat on the bench that way for a little while, arms around each other’s shoulders in those intermittent showers of apple-blossoms, watching the little kids play. Then Sully said he was going to the Sat-urday matinee at the Empire, and he’d better get moving if he didn’t want to miss the previews.

“Why don’t you come, Bobborino? The Black Scorpion’s playing. Monsters galore throughout the store.”

“Can’t, I’m broke,” Bobby said. This was the truth (if you excluded the seven dollars in the Bike Fund jar, that was) and he didn’t want to go to the movies today anyhow, even though he’d heard a kid at school say The Black Scorpion was really great, the scorpions poked their stingers right through people when they killed them and also mashed Mexico City flat.

What Bobby wanted to do was go back to the house and talk to Ted about Lord of the Flies.

“Broke,” Sully said sadly. “That’s a sad fact, Jack. I’d pay your way, but I’ve only got thirty-five cents myself.”

“Don’t sweat it. Hey—where’s your Bo-lo Bouncer?”

Sully looked sadder than ever. “Rubber band snapped. Gone to Bo-lo Heaven, I guess.”

Bobby snickered. Bo-lo Heaven, that was a pretty funny idea. “Gonna buy a new one?”

“I doubt it. There’s a magic kit in Woolworth’s that I want. Sixty different tricks, it says on the box. I wouldn’t mind being a magician when I grow up, Bobby, you know it? Travel around with a carnival or a circus, wear a black suit and a top hat. I’d pull rabbits and shit out of the hat.”

“The rabbits would probably shit in your hat,” Bobby said.

Sully grinned. “But I’d be a cool bastard! Wouldn’t I love to be! At anything!” He got up. “Sure you don’t want to come along? You could probably sneak in past Godzilla.”

Hundreds of kids showed up for the Saturday shows at the Empire, which usually consisted of a creature feature, eight or nine cartoons, Prevues of Coming Attractions, and the MovieTone News. Mrs. God-low went nuts trying to get them to stand in line and shut up, not understanding that on Saturday afternoon you couldn’t get even basi-cally well-behaved kids to act like they were in school. She was also obsessed by the conviction that dozens of kids over twelve were trying to enter at the under-twelve rate; Mrs. G. would have demanded a birth certificate for the Saturday matinees as well as the Brigitte Bardot double features, had she been allowed. Lacking the authority to do that, she settled for barking “WHATYEARYABORN?” to any kid over five and a half feet tall. With all that going on you could some-times sneak past her quite easily, and there was no ticket-ripper on Saturday afternoons. But Bobby didn’t want giant scorpions today; he had spent the last week with more realistic monsters, many of whom had probably looked pretty much like him.

“Nah, I think I’ll just hang around,” Bobby said.

“Okay.” Sully-John scrummed a few apple-blossoms out of his black hair, then looked solemnly at Bobby. “Call me a cool bastard, Big Bob.”

“Sully, you’re one cool bastard.”

“Yes!” Sully-John leaped skyward, punching at the air and laugh-ing. “Yes I am! A cool bastard today! A great big cool bastard of a magician tomorrow! Pow!”

Bobby collapsed against the back of the bench, legs outstretched, sneakers toed in, laughing hard. S-J was just so funny when he got going.

Sully started away, then turned back. “Man, you know what? I saw a couple of weird guys when I came into the park.”

“What was weird about them?”

Sully-John shook his head, looking puzzled. “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t really know.” Then he headed off, singing “At the Hop.” It was one of his favorites. Bobby liked it, too. Danny and the Juniors were great.

Bobby opened the paperback Ted had given him (it was now look-ing exceedingly well thumbed) and read the last couple of pages again, the part where the adults finally showed up. He began to pon-der it again—happy or sad?—and Sully-John slipped from his mind. It occurred to him later that if S-J had happened to mention that the weird guys he’d seen were wearing yellow coats, some things might have been quite different later on.

“William Golding wrote an interesting thing about that book, one which I think speaks to your concern about the ending . . . want another pop, Bobby?”

Bobby shook his head and said no thanks. He didn’t like rootbeer all that much; he mostly drank it out of politeness when he was with Ted. T hey were sitting at Ted’s kitchen table again, Mrs. O’Hara’s dog was still barking (so far as Bobby could tell, Bowser never stopped barking), and Ted was still smoking Chesterfields. Bobby had peeked in at his mother when he came back from the park, saw she was napping on her bed, and then had hastened up to the third floor to ask Ted about the ending of Lord of the Flies.

Ted crossed to the refrigerator . . . and then stopped, standing there with his hand on the fridge door, staring off into space. Bobby would realize later that this was his first clear glimpse of something about Ted that wasn’t right; that was in fact wrong and going wronger all the time.

“One feels them first in the back of one’s eyes,” he said in a con-versational tone. He spoke clearly; Bobby heard every word.

“Feels what?”

“One feels them first in the back of one’s eyes.” Still staring into space with one hand curled around the handle of the refrigerator, and Bobby began to feel frightened. There seemed to be something in the air, something almost like pollen—it made the hairs inside his nose tingle, made the backs of his hands itch.

Then Ted opened the fridge door and bent in. “Sure you don’t want one?” he asked. “It’s good and cold.”

“No . . . no, that’s okay.”

Ted came back to the table, and Bobby understood that he had either decided to ignore what had just happened, or didn’t remember it. He also understood that Ted was okay now, and that was good enough for Bobby. Grownups were weird, that was all. Sometimes you just had to ignore the stuff they did.

“Tell me what he said about the ending. Mr. Golding.”

“As best as I can remember, it was something like this: ‘The boys are rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser, and that is very well for them, but who will rescue the crew?’ ” Ted poured himself a glass of rootbeer, waited for the foam to subside, then poured a little more. “Does that help?”

Bobby turned it over in his mind the way he would a riddle. Hell, it was a riddle. “No,” he said at last. “I still don’t understand. They don’t need to be rescued—the crew of the boat, I mean—because they’re not on the island. Also . . .” He thought of the kids in the sandbox, one of them bawling his eyes out while the other played placidly with the stolen toy. “The guys on the cruiser are grownups. Grownups don’t need to be rescued.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Never?”

Bobby suddenly thought of his mother and how she was about money. Then he remembered the night he had awakened and thought he heard her crying. He didn’t answer.

“Consider it,” Ted said. He drew deeply on his cigarette, then blew out a plume of smoke. “Good books are for consideration after, too.”

“Okay.”

“Lord of the Flies wasn’t much like the Hardy Boys, was it?”

Bobby had a momentary image, very clear, of Frank and Joe Hardy running through the jungle with homemade spears, chanting that they’d kill the pig and stick their spears up her arse. He burst out laughing, and as Ted joined him he knew that he was done with the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brant, and Bomba the Jungle Boy. Lord of the Flies had finished them off. He was very glad he had an adult library card.

“No,” he said, “it sure wasn’t.”

“And good books don’t give up all their secrets at once. Will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Terrific. Now tell me—would you like to earn a dollar a week from me?”

The change of direction was so abrupt that for a moment Bobby couldn’t follow it. Then he grinned and said, “Cripes, yes!” Figures ran dizzily through his mind; Bobby was good enough at math to figure out a dollar a week added up to at least fifteen bucks by Sep-tember. Put with what he already had, plus a reasonable harvest of returnable bottles and some summer lawn-mowing jobs on the street . . . jeepers, he might be riding a Schwinn by Labor Day. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have to be careful about that. Quite careful.” Ted meditated quietly and for so long Bobby began to be afraid he was going to start talking about feeling stuff in the backs of his eyes again. But when Ted looked up, there was none of that strange emptiness in his gaze. His eyes were sharp, if a little rueful. “I would never ask a friend of mine—especially a young friend—to lie to his parents, Bobby, but in this case I’m going to ask you to join me in a little misdirection. Do you know what that is?”

“Sure.” Bobby thought about Sully and his new ambition to travel around with the circus, wearing a black suit and pulling rabbits out of his hat. “It’s what the magician does to fool you.”

“Doesn’t sound very nice when you put it that way, does it?”

Bobby shook his head. No, take away the spangles and the spot-lights 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 mas-saged 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 Pat-terson 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, mean-ing 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. Bider-man 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, Common-wealth 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 root-beer, looked away toward the sound of the eternally barking Bowser . . . and remained that way for several moments, like a toy with a bro-ken 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 for-gotten 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 mount-ing 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 connec-tion, only a momentary sense of groping toward one.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Now, here is the question: could you in good con-science—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, thick-ened 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 dan-gerous 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 after-noon 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 Fri-day, 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.”

“Can you check the bulletin board there, as well?”

“Sure.”

“Good so far, very good. Now—you know the hopscotch patterns kids are always drawing on the sidewalks?”

Bobby nodded.

“Look for ones with stars or moons or both chalked near them, usu-ally in chalk of a different color. Look for kite tails hanging from tele-phone lines. Not the kites themselves, but only the tails. And . . .”

Ted paused, frowning, thinking. As he took a Chesterfield from the pack on the table and lit it, Bobby thought quite reasonably, quite clearly, and without the slightest shred of fear: He’s crazy, y’know. Crazy as a loon.

Yes, of course, how could you doubt it? He only hoped Ted could be careful as well as crazy. Because if his mom heard Ted talking about stuff like this, she’d never let Bobby go near him again. In fact, she’d probably send for the guys with the butterfly nets . . . or ask good old Don Biderman to do it for her.

“You know the clock in the town square, Bobby?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It may begin ringing wrong hours, or between hours. Also, look for reports of minor church vandalism in the paper. My friends dislike churches, but they never do anything too outrageous; they like to keep a—pardon the pun—low profile. There are other signs that they’re about, but there’s no need to overload you. Personally I believe the posters are the surest clue.”

“ ‘If you see Ginger, please bring her home.’ ”

“That’s exactly r—”

“Bobby?” It was his mom’s voice, followed by the ascending scuff of her Saturday sneakers. “Bobby, are you up there?”