Hearts In Atlantis

III. A MOTHER’S POWER. BOBBY DOES HIS JOB. “DOES HE TOUCH YOU?” THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL.

Bobby and Ted exchanged a guilty look. Both of them sat back on their respective sides of the table, as if they had been doing some-thing crazy instead of just talking about crazy stuff.

She’ll see we’ve been up to something, Bobby thought with dis-may. It’s all over my face.

“No,” Ted said to him. “It is not. T hat is her power over you, that you believe it. It’s a mother’s power.”

Bobby stared at him, amazed. Did you read my mind? Did you read my mind just then?

Now his mom was almost to the third-floor landing and there was no time for a reply even if Ted had wanted to make one. But there was no look on his face saying he would have replied if there had been time, either. And Bobby at once began to doubt what he had heard.

Then his mother was in the open doorway, looking from her son to Ted and back to her son again, her eyes assessing. “So here you are after all,” she said. “My goodness, Bobby, didn’t you hear me calling?”

“You were up here before I got a chance to say boo, Mom.”

She snorted. Her mouth made a small, meaningless smile—her automatic social smile. Her eyes went back and forth between the two of them, back and forth, looking for something out of place, something she didn’t like, something wrong. “I didn’t hear you come in from outdoors.”

“You were asleep on your bed.”

“How are you today, Mrs. Garfield?” Ted asked.

“Fine as paint.” Back and forth went her eyes. Bobby had no idea what she was looking for, but that expression of dismayed guilt must have left his face. If she had seen it, he would know already; would know that she knew.

“Would you like a bottle of pop?” Ted asked. “I have rootbeer. It’s not much, but it’s cold.”

“That would be nice,” Liz said. “Thanks.” She came all the way in and sat down next to Bobby at the kitchen table. She patted him absently on the leg, watching Ted as he opened his little fridge and got out the rootbeer. “It’s not hot up here yet, Mr. Brattigan, but I guar-antee you it will be in another month. You want to get yourself a fan.”

“There’s an idea.” Ted poured rootbeer into a clean glass, then stood in front of the fridge holding the glass up to the light, waiting for the foam to go down. To Bobby he looked like a scientist in a T V commercial, one of those guys obsessed with Brand X and Brand Y and how Rolaids consumed fifty-seven times its own weight in excess stomach acid, amazing but true.

“I don’t need a full glass, that will be fine,” she said a little impa-tiently. Ted brought the glass to her, and she raised it to him. “Here’s how.” She took a swallow and grimaced as if it had been rye instead of rootbeer. Then she watched over the top of the glass as Ted sat down, tapped the ash from his smoke, and tucked the stub of the cig-arette back into the corner of his mouth.

“You two have gotten thicker than thieves,” she remarked. “Sit-ting here at the kitchen table, drinking rootbeer—cozy, thinks I! What’ve you been talking about today?”

“The book Mr. Brautigan gave me,” Bobby said. His voice sounded natural and calm, a voice with no secrets behind it. “Lord of the Flies. I couldn’t figure out if the ending was happy or sad, so I thought I’d ask him.”

“Oh? And what did he say?”

“That it was both. Then he told me to consider it.”

Liz laughed without a great deal of humor. “I read mysteries, Mr. Brattigan, and save my consideration for real life. But of course I’m not retired.”

“No,” Ted said. “You are obviously in the very prime of life.”

She gave him her flattery-will-get-you-nowhere look. Bobby knew it well.

“I also offered Bobby a small job,” Ted told her. “He has agreed to take it . . . with your permission, of course.”

Her brow furrowed at the mention of a job, smoothed at the men-tion of permission. She reached out and briefly touched Bobby’s red hair, a gesture so unusual that Bobby’s eyes widened a little. Her eyes never left Ted’s face as she did it. Not only did she not trust the man, Bobby realized, she was likely never going to trust him. “What sort of job did you have in mind?”

“He wants me to—”

“Hush,” she said, and still her eyes peered over the top of her glass, never leaving Ted.

“I’d like him to read me the paper, perhaps in the afternoons,” Ted said, then explained how his eyes weren’t what they used to be and how he had worse problems every day with the finer print. But he liked to keep up with the news—these were very interesting times, didn’t Mrs. Garfield think so?—and he liked to keep up with the columns, as well, Stewart Alsop and Walter Winchell and such. Winchell was a gossip, of course, but an interesting gossip, didn’t Mrs. Garfield agree?

Bobby listened, increasingly tense even though he could tell from his mother’s face and posture—even from the way she sipped her rootbeer—that she believed what Ted was telling her. T hat part of it was all right, but what if Ted went blank again? Went blank and started babbling about low men in yellow coats or the tails of kites hanging from telephone wires, all the time gazing off into space?

But nothing like that happened. Ted finished by saying he also liked to know how the Dodgers were doing—Maury Wills, espe-cially—even though they had gone to L.A. He said this with the air of one who is determined to tell the truth even if the truth is a bit shameful. Bobby thought it was a nice touch.

“I suppose that would be fine,” his mother said (almost grudg-ingly, Bobby thought). “In fact it sounds like a plum. I wish I could have a plum job like that.”

“I’ll bet you’re excellent at your job, Mrs. Garfield.”

She flashed him her dry flattery-won’t-work-with-me expression again. “You’ll have to pay him extra to do the crossword for you,” she said, getting up, and although Bobby didn’t understand the remark, he was astonished by the cruelty he sensed in it, embedded like a piece of glass in a marshmallow. It was as if she wanted to make fun of Ted’s failing eyesight and his intellect at the same time; as if she wanted to hurt him for being nice to her son. Bobby was still ashamed at deceiving her and frightened that she would find out, but now he was also glad . . . almost viciously glad. She deserved it. “He’s good at the crossword, my Bobby.”

Ted smiled. “I’m sure he is.”

“Come on downstairs, Bob. It’s time to give Mr. Brattigan a rest.”

“But—”

“I think I would like to lie down awhile, Bobby. I’ve a little bit of a headache. I’m glad you liked Lord of the Flies. You can start your job tomorrow, if you like, with the feature section of the Sunday paper. I warn you it’s apt to be a trial by fire.”

“Okay.”

Mom had reached the little landing outside of Ted’s door. Bobby was behind her. Now she turned back and looked at Ted over Bobby’s head. “Why not outside on the porch?” she asked. “The fresh air will be nice for both of you. Better than this stuffy room. And I’ll be able to hear, too, if I’m in the living room.”

Bobby thought some message was passing between them. Not via telepathy, exactly . . . only it was telepathy, in a way. The humdrum sort adults practiced.

“A fine idea,” Ted said. “T he front porch would be lovely. Good afternoon, Bobby. Good afternoon, Mrs. Garfield.”

Bobby came very close to saying Seeya, Ted and substituted “See you, Mr. Brautigan” at the last moment. He moved toward the stairs, smiling vaguely, with the sweaty feeling of someone who has just avoided a nasty accident.

His mother lingered. “How long have you been retired, Mr. Brat-tigan? Or do you mind me asking?”

Bobby had almost decided she wasn’t mispronouncing Ted’s name deliberately; now he swung the other way. She was. Of course she was.

“Three years.” He crushed his cigarette out in the brimming tin ashtray and immediately lit another.

“Which would make you . . . sixty-eight?”

“Sixty-six, actually.” His voice continued mild and open, but Bobby had an idea he didn’t much care for these questions. “I was granted retirement with full benefits two years early. Medical reasons.”

Don’t ask him what’s wrong with him, Mom, Bobby moaned inside his own head. Don’t you dare.

She didn’t. She asked what he’d done in Hartford instead.

“Accounting. I was in the Office of the Comptroller.”

“Bobby and I guessed something to do with education. Account-ing! That sounds very responsible.”

Ted smiled. Bobby thought there was something awful about it.

“In twenty years I wore out three adding machines. If that is respon-sibility, Mrs. Garfield, why yes—I was responsible. Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees; the typist puts a record on the gramo-phone with an automatic hand.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s my way of saying that it was a lot of years in a job that never seemed to mean much.”

“It might have meant a good deal if you’d had a child to feed, shel-ter, and raise.” She looked at him with her chin slightly tilted, the look that meant if Ted wanted to discuss this, she was ready. T hat she would go to the mat with him on the subject if that was his pleasure.

Ted, Bobby was relieved to find, didn’t want to go to the mat or anywhere near it. “I expect you’re right, Mrs. Garfield. Entirely.”

She gave him a moment more of the lifted chin, asking if he was sure, giving him time to change his mind. When Ted said nothing else, she smiled. It was her victory smile. Bobby loved her, but sud-denly he was tired of her as well. Tired of knowing her looks, her say-ings, and the adamant cast of her mind.

“Thank you for the rootbeer, Mr. Brattigan. It was very tasty.” And with that she led her son downstairs. When they got to the second-floor landing she dropped his hand and went the rest of the way ahead of him.

Bobby thought they would discuss his new job further over sup-per, but they didn’t. His mom seemed far away from him, her eyes distant. He had to ask her twice for a second slice of meatloaf and when later that evening the telephone rang, she jumped up from the couch where they had been watching TV to get it. She jumped for it the way Ricky Nelson did when it rang on the Ozzie and Harriet show. She listened, said something, then came back to the couch and sat down.

“Who was it?” Bobby asked.

“Wrong number,” Liz said.

In that year of his life Bobby Garfield still waited for sleep with a child’s welcoming confidence: on his back, heels spread to the corners of the bed, hands tucked into the cool under the pillow so his elbows stuck up. On the night after Ted spoke to him about the low men in their yellow coats (and don’t forget their cars, he thought, their big cars with the fancy paintjobs), Bobby lay in this position with the sheet pushed down to his waist. Moonlight fell on his nar-row child’s chest, squared in four by the shadows of the window muntins.

If he had thought about it (he hadn’t), he would have expected Ted’s low men to become more real once he was alone in the dark, with only the tick of his wind-up Big Ben and the murmur of the late TV news from the other room to keep him company. That was the way it had always been with him—it was easy to laugh at Franken-stein on Shock Theater, to go fake-swoony and cry “Ohhh, Frankie!” when the monster showed up, especially if Sully-John was there for a sleepover. But in the dark, after S-J had started to snore (or worse, if Bobby was alone), Dr. Frankenstein’s creature seemed a lot more . . . not real, exactly, but . . . possible.

That sense of possibility did not gather around Ted’s low men. If anything, the idea that people would communicate with each other via lost-pet posters seemed even crazier in the dark. But not a dan-gerous crazy. Bobby didn’t think Ted was really, deeply crazy, anyhow; just a bit too smart for his own good, especially since he had so few things with which to occupy his time. Ted was a little . . . well . . . cripes, a little what? Bobby couldn’t express it. If the word eccentric had occurred to him he would have seized it with pleasure and relief.

But . . . it seemed like he read my mind. What about that?

Oh, he was wrong, that was all, mistaken about what he thought he’d heard. Or maybe Ted had read his mind, read it with that essen-tially uninteresting adult ESP, peeling guilt off his face like a wet decal off a piece of glass. God knew his mother could always do that . . . at least until today.

But—

But nothing. Ted was a nice guy who knew a lot about books, but he was no mind-reader. No more than Sully-John Sullivan was a magician, or ever would be.

“It’s all misdirection,” Bobby murmured. He slipped his hands out from under his pillow, crossed them at the wrists, wagged them. The shadow of a dove flew across the moonlight on his chest.

Bobby smiled, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

The next morning he sat on the front porch and read several pieces aloud from the Harwich Sunday Journal. Ted perched on the porch glider, listening quietly and smoking Chesterfields. Behind him and to his left, the curtains flapped in and out of the open windows of the Garfield front room. Bobby imagined his mom sitting in the chair where the light was best, sewing basket beside her, listening and hemming skirts (hemlines were going down again, she’d told him a week or two before; take them up one year, pick out the stitches the following spring and lower them again, all because a bunch of poofers in New York and London said to, and why she bothered she didn’t know). Bobby had no idea if she really was there or not, the open win-dows and blowing curtains meant nothing by themselves, but he imagined it all the same. When he was a little older it would occur to him that he had always imagined her there—outside doors, in that part of the bleachers where the shadows were too thick to see properly, in the dark at the top of the stairs, he had always imagined she was there.

The sports pieces he read were interesting (Maury Wills was steal-ing up a storm), the feature articles less so, the opinion columns bor-ing and long and incomprehensible, full of phrases like “fiscal responsibility” and “economic indicators of a recessionary nature.” Even so, Bobby didn’t mind reading them. He was doing a job, after all, earning dough, and a lot of jobs were boring at least some of the time. “You have to work for your Wheaties,” his mother sometimes said after Mr. Biderman had kept her late. Bobby was proud just to be able to get a phrase like “economic indicators of a recessionary nature” to come off his tongue. Besides, the other job—the hidden job—arose from Ted’s crazy idea that some men were out to get him, and Bobby would have felt weird taking money just for doing that one; would have felt like he was tricking Ted somehow even though it had been Ted’s idea in the first place.

That was still part of his job, though, crazy or not, and he began doing it that Sunday afternoon. Bobby walked around the block while his mom was napping, looking for either low men in yellow coats or signs of them. He saw a number of interesting things—over on Colony Street a woman arguing with her husband about some-thing, the two of them standing nose-to-nose like Gorgeous George and Haystacks Calhoun before the start of a rassling match; a little kid on Asher Avenue bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock; liplocked teenagers outside of Spicer’s Variety Store on the corner of Commonwealth and Broad; a panel truck with the interesting slogan YUMMY FOR THE TUMMY written on the side—but he saw no yellow coats or lost-pet announcements on phone poles; not a single kite tail hung from a single telephone wire.

He stopped in at Spicer’s for a penny gumball and gleeped the bulletin board, which was dominated by photos of this year’s Miss Rheingold candidates. He saw two cards offering car for sale by owner, but neither was upside down. There was another one that said MUSTSELL MY BACKYARD POOL, GOOD SHAPE, YOUR KIDS WILL LOVE IT, and that one was crooked, but Bobby didn’t guess crooked counted.

On Asher Avenue he saw a whale of a Buick parked at a hydrant, but it was bottle-green, and Bobby didn’t think it qualified as loud and vulgar in spite of the portholes up the sides of the hood and the grille, which looked like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish.

On Monday he continued looking for low men on his way to and from school. He saw nothing . . . but Carol Gerber, who was walking with him and S-J, saw him looking. His mother was right, Carol was really sharp.

“Are the commie agents after the plans?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You keep staring everywhere. Even behind you.”

For a moment Bobby considered telling them what Ted had hired him to do, then decided it would be a bad idea. It might have been a good one if he believed there was really something to look for—three pairs of eyes instead of one, Carol’s sharp little peepers included— but he didn’t. Carol and Sully-John knew that he had a job reading Ted the paper every day, and that was all right. It was enough. If he told them about the low men, it would feel like making fun, some-how. A betrayal.

“Commie agents?” Sully asked, whirling around. “Yeah, I see em, I see em!” He drew down his mouth and made the eh-eh-eh noise again (it was his favorite). Then he staggered, dropped his invisible tommygun, clutched his chest. “They got me! I’m hit bad! Go on without me! Give my love to Rose!”

“I’ll give it to my aunt’s fat fanny,” Carol said, and elbowed him.

“I’m looking for guys from St. Gabe’s, that’s all,” Bobby said.

This was plausible; boys from St. Gabriel the Steadfast Upper and Secondary were always harassing the Harwich Elementary kids as the Elementary kids walked to school—buzzing them on their bikes, shouting that the boys were sissies, that the girls “put out” . . . which Bobby was pretty sure meant tongue-kissing and letting boys touch their titties.

“Nah, those dinkberries don’t come along until later,” Sully-John said. “Right now they’re all still home puttin on their crosses and combin their hair back like Bobby Rydell.”

“Don’t swear,” Carol said, and elbowed him again.

Sully-John looked wounded. “Who swore? I didn’t swear.”

“Yes you did.”

“I did not, Carol.”

“Did.”

“No sir, did not.”

“Yes sir, did too, you said dinkberries.”

“That’s not a swear! Dinkberries are berries!” S-J looked at Bobby for help, but Bobby was looking up at Asher Avenue, where a Cadil-lac was cruising slowly by. It was big, and he supposed it was a little flashy, but wasn’t any Cadillac? This one was painted a conservative light brown and didn’t look low to him. Besides, the person at the wheel was a woman.

“Yeah? Show me a picture of a dinkberry in the encyclopedia and maybe I’ll believe you.”

“I ought to poke you,” Sully said amiably. “Show you who’s boss. Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

“Me Carol, you Jughead. Here.” Carol thrust three books—arith-metic, Adventures in Spelling, and The Little House on the Prairie—into S-J’s hands. “Carry my books cause you swore.”

Sully-John looked more wounded than ever. “Why should I have to carry your stupid books even if I did swear, which I didn’t?”

“It’s pennants,” Carol said.

“What the heck is pennants?”

“Making up for something you do wrong. If you swear or tell a lie, you have to do pennants. One of the St. Gabe’s boys told me. Willie, his name is.”

“You shouldn’t hang around with them,” Bobby said. “They can be mean.” He knew this from personal experience. Just after Christ-mas vacation ended, three St. Gabe’s boys had chased him down Broad Street, threatening to beat him up because he had “looked at them wrong.” They would have done it, too, Bobby thought, if the one in the lead hadn’t slipped in the slush and gone to his knees. The others had tripped over him, allowing Bobby just time enough to nip in through the big front door of 149 and turn the lock. The St. Gabe’s boys had hung around outside for a little while, then had gone away after promising Bobby that they would “see him later.”

“They’re not all hoods, some of them are okay,” Carol said. She looked at Sully-John, who was carrying her books, and hid a smile with one hand. You could get S-J to do anything if you talked fast and sounded sure of yourself. It would have been nicer to have Bobby carry her books, but it wouldn’t have been any good unless he asked her. Someday he might; she was an optimist. In the meantime it was nice to be walking here between them in the morning sunshine. She stole a glance at Bobby, who was looking down at a hopscotch grid drawn on the sidewalk. He was so cute, and he didn’t even know it. Somehow that was the cutest thing of all.

The last week of school passed as it always did, with a maddening, half-crippled slowness. On those early June days Bobby thought the smell of the paste in the library was almost strong enough to gag a maggot, and geography seemed to last ten thousand years. Who cared how much tin there was in Paraguay?

At recess Carol talked about how she was going to her aunt Cora and uncle Ray’s farm in Pennsylvania for a week in July; S-J went on and on about the week of camp he’d won and how he was going to shoot arrows at targets and go out in a canoe every day he was there. Bobby, in turn, told them about the great Maury Wills, who might set a record for base-stealing that would never be broken in their lifetime.

His mom was increasingly preoccupied, jumping each time the telephone rang and then running for it, staying up past the late news (and sometimes, Bobby suspected, until the Nite-Owl Movie was over), and only picking at her meals. Sometimes she would have long, intense conversations on the phone with her back turned and her voice lowered (as if Bobby wanted to eavesdrop on her conversa-tions, anyway). Sometimes she’d go to the telephone, start to dial it, then drop it back in its cradle and return to the couch.

On one of these occasions Bobby asked her if she had forgotten what number she wanted to call. “Seems like I’ve forgotten a lot of things,” she muttered, and then: “Mind your beeswax, Bobby-O.”

He might have noticed more and worried even more than he did—she was getting thin and had picked up the cigarette habit again after almost stopping for two years—if he hadn’t had lots of stuff to occupy his own mind and time. The best thing was the adult library card, which seemed like a better gift, a more inspired gift, each time he used it. Bobby felt there were a billion science-fiction novels alone in the adult section that he wanted to read. Take Isaac Asimov, for instance. Under the name of Paul French, Mr. Asimov wrote science-fiction novels for kids about a space pilot named Lucky Starr, and they were pretty good. Under his own name he had written other novels, even better ones. At least three of them were about robots. Bobby loved robots. Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet was one of the all-time great movie characters, in his opinion, totally ripshit, and Mr. Asimov’s were almost as good. Bobby thought he would be spending a lot of time with them in the summer ahead. (Sully called this great writer Isaac Ass-Move, but of course Sully was almost totally ignorant about books.)

Going to school he looked for the men in the yellow coats, or signs of them; going to the library after school he did the same. Because school and library were in opposite directions, Bobby felt he was cov-ering a pretty good part of Harwich. He never expected to actually see any low men, of course. After supper, in the long light of evening, he would read the paper to Ted, either on the porch or in Ted’s kitchen. Ted had followed Liz Garfield’s advice and gotten a fan, and Bobby’s mom no longer seemed concerned that Bobby should read to “Mr. Brattigan” out on the porch. Some of this was her growing preoccupation with her own adult matters, Bobby felt, but perhaps she was also coming to trust Ted a little more. Not that trust was the same as liking. Not that it had come easily, either.

One night while they were on the couch watching Wyatt Earp, his mom turned to Bobby almost fiercely and said, “Does he ever touch you?”

Bobby understood what she was asking, but not why she was so wound up. “Well, sure,” he said. “He claps me on the back some-times, and once when I was reading the paper to him and screwed up some really long word three times in a row he gave me a Dutch rub, but he doesn’t roughhouse or anything. I don’t think he’s strong enough for stuff like that. Why?”

“Never mind,” she said. “He’s fine, I guess. Got his head in the clouds, no question about it, but he doesn’t seem like a . . .” She trailed off, watching the smoke from her Kool cigarette rise in the living-room air. It went up from the coal in a pale gray ribbon and then disap-peared, making Bobby think of the way the characters in Mr. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun followed the spiraling top into other worlds.

At last she turned to him again and said, “If he ever touches you in a way you don’t like, you come and tell me. Right away. You hear?”

“Sure, Mom.” There was something in her look that made him remember once when he’d asked her how a woman knew she was going to have a baby. She bleeds every month, his mom had said. If

there’s no blood, she knows it’s because the blood is going into a baby.

Bobby had wanted to ask where this blood came out when there was no baby being made (he remembered a nosebleed his mom had had once, but no other instances of maternal bleeding). The look on her face, however, had made him drop the subject. She wore the same look now.

Actually there had been other touches: Ted might run one of his big hands across Bobby’s crewcut, kind of patting the bristles; he would sometimes gently catch Bobby’s nose between his knuckles and intone Sound it out! if Bobby mispronounced a word; if they spoke at the same moment he would hook one of his little fingers around one of Bobby’s little fingers and say Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill. Soon Bobby was saying it with him, their little fingers locked, their voices as matter-of-fact as people saying pass the peas or how you doing.

Only once did Bobby feel uncomfortable when Ted touched him. Bobby had just finished the last newspaper piece Ted wanted to hear—some columnist blabbing on about how there was nothing wrong with Cuba that good old American free enterprise couldn’t fix. Dusk was beginning to streak the sky. Back on Colony Street, Mrs. O’Hara’s dog Bowser barked on and on, roop-roop-roop, the sound lost and somehow dreamy, seeming more like something remem-bered than something happening at that moment.

“Well,” Bobby said, folding the paper and getting up, “I think I’ll take a walk around the block and see what I see.” He didn’t want to come right out and say it, but he wanted Ted to know he was still looking for the low men in the yellow coats.

Ted also got up and approached him. Bobby was saddened to see the fear on Ted’s face. He didn’t want Ted to believe in the low men too much, didn’t want Ted to be too crazy. “Be back before dark, Bobby. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you.”

“I’ll be careful. And I’ll be back years before dark.”

Ted dropped to one knee (he was too old to just hunker, Bobby guessed) and took hold of Bobby’s shoulders. He drew Bobby for-ward until their brows were almost bumping. Bobby could smell cig-arettes on Ted’s breath and ointment on his skin—he rubbed his joints with Musterole because they ached. These days they ached even in warm weather, he said.

Being this close to Ted wasn’t scary, but it was sort of awful, just the same. You could see that even if Ted wasn’t totally old now, he soon would be. He’d probably be sick, too. His eyes were watery. The cor-ners of his mouth were trembling a little. It was too bad he had to be all alone up here on the third floor, Bobby thought. If he’d had a wife or something, he might never have gotten this bee in his bonnet about the low men. Of course if he’d had a wife, Bobby might never have read Lord of the Flies. A selfish way to think, but he couldn’t help it.

“No sign of them, Bobby?”

Bobby shook his head.

“And you feel nothing? Nothing here?” He took his right hand from Bobby’s left shoulder and tapped his own temple, where two blue veins nested, pulsing slightly. Bobby shook his head. “Or here?” Ted pulled down the corner of his right eye. Bobby shook his head again. “Or here?” Ted touched his stomach. Bobby shook his head a third time.

“Okay,” Ted said, and smiled. He slipped his left hand up to the back of Bobby’s neck. His right hand joined it. He looked solemnly into Bobby’s eyes and Bobby looked solemnly back. “You’d tell me if you did, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t try to . . . oh, I don’t know . . . to spare my feelings?”

“No,” Bobby said. He liked Ted’s hands on the back of his neck and didn’t like them at the same time. It was where a guy in a movie might put his hands just before he kissed the girl. “No, I’d tell, that’s my job.”

Ted nodded. He slowly unlaced his hands and let them drop. He got to his feet, using the table for support and grimacing when one knee popped loudly. “Yes, you’d tell me, you’re a good kid. Go on, take your walk. But stay on the sidewalk, Bobby, and be home before dark. You have to be careful these days.”

“I’ll be careful.” He started down the stairs.

“And if you see them—”

“I’ll run.”

“Yeah.” In the fading light, Ted’s face was grim. “Like hell was after you.”

So there had been touching, and perhaps his mother’s fears had been justified in a way—perhaps there had been too much touching and some of the wrong sort. Not wrong in whatever way she thought, maybe, but still wrong. Still dangerous.

On the Wednesday before school let out for the summer, Bobby saw a red strip of cloth hanging from somebody’s TV antenna over on Colony Street. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked remarkably like a kite tail. Bobby’s feet stopped dead. At the same time his heart accelerated until it was hammering the way it did when he raced Sully-John home from school.

It’s a coincidence even if it is a kite tail, he told himself. Just a lousy coincidence. You know that, don’t you?

Maybe. Maybe he knew. He had almost come to believe it, any-way, when school let out for the summer on Friday. Bobby walked home by himself that day; Sully-John had volunteered to stay and help put books away in the storeroom and Carol was going over to Tina Lebel’s for Tina’s birthday party. Just before crossing Asher Avenue and starting down Broad Street Hill, he saw a hopscotch grid drawn on the sidewalk in purple chalk. It looked like this:

“Oh Christ no,” Bobby whispered. “You gotta be kidding.”

He dropped to one knee like a cavalry scout in a western movie, oblivious of the kids passing by him on their way home—some walk-ing, some on bikes, a couple on roller skates, buck-toothed Francis Utterson on his rusty red scooter, honking laughter at the sky as he paddled along. They were almost as oblivious of him; the Big Vac had just started, and most were dazed by all the possibilities.

“Oh no, oh no, I don’t believe it, you gotta be kidding.” He reached out toward the star and the crescent moon—they were drawn in yellow chalk, not purple—almost touched them, then drew his hand back. A piece of red ribbon caught on a TV antenna didn’t have to mean anything. When you added this, though, could it still be coincidence? Bobby didn’t know. He was only eleven and there were a bazillion things he didn’t know. But he was afraid . . . afraid that . . .

He got to his feet and looked around, half-expecting to see a whole line of long, overbright cars coming down Asher Avenue, rolling slow the way cars did when they were following a hearse to the graveyard, with their headlights on in the middle of the day. Half-expecting to see men in yellow coats standing beneath the marquee of the Asher Empire or out in front of Sukey’s Tavern, smoking Camels and watching him.

No cars. No men. Just kids heading home from school. The first ones from St. Gabe’s, conspicuous in their green uniform pants and skirts, were visible among them.

Bobby turned around and backtracked for three blocks up Asher Avenue, too worried about what he’d seen chalked on the sidewalk to concern himself about bad-tempered St. Gabe’s boys. There was noth-ing on the Avenue telephone poles but a few posters advertising Bingo Nite at the St. Gabriel Parish Hall and one on the corner of Asher and Tacoma announcing a rock-and-roll show in Hartford starring Clyde McPhatter and Duane Eddy, the Man with the Twangy Guitar.

By the time he got to Asher Avenue News, which was almost all the way back to school, Bobby was starting to hope he had over-reacted. Still, he went in to look at their bulletin board, then all the way down Broad Street to Spicer’s Variety, where he bought another gumball and checked that bulletin board as well. Nothing suspicious on either one. In Spicer’s the card advertising the backyard pool was gone, but so what? The guy had probably sold it. Why else had he put the card up in the first place, for God’s sake?

Bobby left and stood on the corner, chewing his gumball and try-ing to make up his mind what to do next.

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps. Bobby Garfield made the first adult decision of his life on the day he finished the sixth grade, concluding it would be wrong to tell Ted about the stuff he had seen . . . at least for the time being.

His assumption that the low men didn’t exist had been shaken, but Bobby wasn’t ready to give it up. Not on the evidence he had so far. Ted would be upset if Bobby told him what he had seen, maybe upset enough to toss his stuff back into his suitcases (plus those carryhandle bags folded up behind his little fridge) and just take off. If there really were bad guys after him, flight would make sense, but Bobby didn’t want to lose the only adult friend he’d ever had if there weren’t. So he decided to wait and see what, if anything, happened next.

That night Bobby Garfield experienced another aspect of adult-hood: he lay awake until well after his Big Ben alarm clock said it was two in the morning, looking up at the ceiling and wondering if he had done the right thing.

IV. TED GOES BLANK. BOBBY GOES TO THE BEACH. MCQUOWN. THE WINKLE.

The day after school ended, Carol Gerber’s mom crammed her Ford Estate Wagon with kids and took them to Savin Rock, a seaside amusement park twenty miles from Harwich. Anita Gerber had done this three years running, which made it an ancient tradition to Bobby, S-J, Carol, Carol’s little brother, and Carol’s girlfriends, Yvonne, Angie, and Tina. Neither Sully-John nor Bobby would have gone any-where with three girls on his own, but since they were together it was okay. Besides, the lure of Savin Rock was too strong to resist. It would still be too cold to do much more than wade in the ocean, but they could goof on the beach and all the rides would be open—the midway, too. The year before, Sully-John had knocked down three pyramids of wooden milk-bottles with just three baseballs, winning his mother a large pink teddy bear which still held pride of place on top of the Sullivan TV. Today S-J wanted to win it a mate.

For Bobby, just getting away from Harwich for a little while was an attraction. He had seen nothing suspicious since the star and the moon scribbled next to the hopscotch grid, but Ted gave him a bad scare while Bobby was reading him the Saturday newspaper, and hard on the heels of that came an ugly argument with his mother.

The thing with Ted happened while Bobby was reading an opinion piece scoffing at the idea that Mickey Mantle would ever break Babe Ruth’s home-run record. He didn’t have the stamina or the dedica-tion, the columnist insisted. “ ‘Above all, the character of this man is wrong,’ ” Bobby read. “ ‘The so-called Mick is more interested in night-clubbing than—’ ”

Ted had blanked out again. Bobby knew this, felt it somehow, even before he looked up from the newspaper. Ted was staring emp-tily out his window toward Colony Street and the hoarse, monoto-nous barking of Mrs. O’Hara’s dog. It was the second time he’d done it this morning, but the first lapse had lasted only a few seconds (Ted bent into the open refrigerator, eyes wide in the frosty light, not moving . . . then giving a jerk, a little shake, and reaching for the orange juice). This time he was totally gone. Wigsville, man, as Kookie might have said on 77 Sunset Strip. Bobby rattled the news-paper to see if he could wake him up that way. Nothing.

“Ted? Are you all r—” With sudden dawning horror, Bobby real-ized something was wrong with the pupils of Ted’s eyes. T hey were growing and shrinking in his face as Bobby watched. It was as if Ted were plunging rapidly in and out of some abysmally black place . . . and yet all he was doing was sitting there in the sunshine.

“Ted?”

A cigarette was burning in the ashtray, except it was now nothing but stub and ash. Looking at it, Bobby realized Ted must have been out for almost the entire article on Mantle. And that thing his eyes were doing, the pupils swelling and contracting, swelling and con-tracting . . .

He’s having an epilepsy attack or something. God, don’t they sometimes swallow their tongues when that happens?

Ted’s tongue looked to be where it belonged, but his eyes . . . his eyes—

“Ted! Ted, wake up!”

Bobby was around to Ted’s side of the table before he was even aware he was moving. He grabbed Ted by the shoulders and shook him. It was like shaking a piece of wood carved to look like a man. Under his cotton pullover shirt Ted’s shoulders were hard and scrawny and unyielding.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

“They draw west now.” Ted continued to look out the window with his strange moving eyes. “That’s good. But they may be back. They . . .”

Bobby stood with his hands on Ted’s shoulders, frightened and awestruck. Ted’s pupils expanded and contracted like a heartbeat you could see. “Ted, what’s wrong?”

“I must be very still. I must be a hare in the bush. They may pass by. There will be water if God wills it, and they may pass by. All things serve . . .”

“Serve what?” Almost whispering now. “Serve what, Ted?”

“All things serve the Beam,” Ted said, and suddenly his hands closed over Bobby’s. They were very cold, those hands, and for a moment Bobby felt nightmarish, fainting terror. It was like being gripped by a corpse that could only move its hands and the pupils of its dead eyes.

Then Ted was looking at him, and although his eyes were frightened, they were almost normal again. Not dead at all.

“Bobby?”

Bobby pulled his hands free and put them around Ted’s neck. He hugged him, and as he did Bobby heard a bell tolling in his head— this was very brief but very clear. He could even hear the pitch of the bell shift, the way the pitch of a train-whistle did if the train was moving fast. It was as if something inside his head were passing at high speed. He heard a rattle of hooves on some hard surface. Wood? No, metal. He smelled dust, dry and thundery in his nose. At the same moment the backs of his eyes began to itch.

“Shhh!” Ted’s breath in his ear was as dry as the smell of that dust, and somehow intimate. His hands were on Bobby’s back, cupping his shoulderblades and holding him still. “Not a word! Not a thought. Except . . . baseball! Yes, baseball, if you like!”

Bobby thought of Maury Wills getting his lead off first, a walking lead, measuring three steps . . . then four . . . Wills bent over at the waist, hands dangling, heels raised slightly off the dirt, he can go either way, it depends on what the pitcher does . . . and when the pitcher goes to the plate Wills heads for second in an explosion of speed and dust and—

Gone. Everything was gone. No bell ringing in his head, no sound of hooves, no smell of dust. No itching behind his eyes, either. Had that itching really ever been there? Or had he just made it up because Ted’s eyes were scaring him?

“Bobby,” Ted said, again directly into Bobby’s ear. T he movement of Ted’s lips against his skin made him shiver. T hen: “Good God, what am I doing?”

He pushed Bobby away, gently but firmly. His face looked dis-mayed and a little too pale, but his eyes were back to normal, his pupils holding steady. For the moment that was all Bobby cared about. He felt strange, though—muzzy in the head, as if he’d just woken up from a heavy nap. At the same time the world looked amazingly brilliant, every line and shape perfectly defined.

“Shazam,” Bobby said, and laughed shakily. “What just happened?”

“Nothing to concern you.” Ted reached for his cigarette and seemed surprised to see only a tiny smoldering scrap left in the groove where he had set it. He brushed it into the ashtray with his knuckle. “I went off again, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, way off. I was scared. I thought you were having an epilepsy fit or something. Your eyes—”

“It’s not epilepsy,” Ted said. “And it’s not dangerous. But if it hap-pens again, it would be best if you didn’t touch me.”

“Why?”

Ted lit a fresh cigarette. “Just because. Will you promise?”

“Okay. What’s the Beam?”

Ted gazed at him sharply. “I spoke of the Beam?”

“You said ‘All things serve the Beam.’ I think that was it.”

“Perhaps sometime I’ll tell you, but not today. Today you’re going to the beach, aren’t you?”

Bobby jumped, startled. He looked at Ted’s clock and saw it was almost nine o’clock. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I ought to start getting ready. I could finish reading you the paper when I get back.”

“Yes, good. A fine idea. I have some letters to write.”

No you don’t, you just want to get rid of me before I ask any other questions you don’t want to answer.

But if that was what Ted was doing it was all right. As Liz Garfield so often said, Bobby had his own fish to fry. Still, as he reached the door to Ted’s room, the thought of the red scrap of cloth hanging from the TV aerial and the crescent moon and the star next to the hopscotch grid made him turn reluctantly back.

“Ted, there’s something—”

“The low men, yes, I know.” Ted smiled. “For now don’t trouble yourself about them, Bobby. For now all is well. They aren’t moving this way or even looking this way.”

“They draw west,” Bobby said.

Ted looked at him through a scurf of rising cigarette smoke, his blue eyes steady. “Yes,” he said, “and with luck they’ll stay west. Seattle would be fine with me. Have a good time at the seaside, Bobby.”

“But I saw—”

“Perhaps you saw only shadows. In any case, this isn’t the time to talk. Just remember what I said—if I should go blank like that again, just sit and wait for it to pass. If I should reach for you, stand back. If I should get up, tell me to sit down. In that state I will do as you say. It’s like being hypnotized.”

“Why do you—”

“No more questions, Bobby. Please.”

“You’re okay? Really okay?”

“In the pink. Now go. Enjoy your day.”

Bobby hurried downstairs, again struck by how sharp everything seemed to be: the brilliance of the light slanting through the window on the second-floor landing, a ladybug crawling around the lip of an empty milk-bottle outside the door of the Proskys’ apartment, a sweet high humming in his ears that was like the voice of the day— the first Saturday of summer vacation.

Back in the apartment, Bobby grabbed his toy cars and trucks from various stashes under his bed and at the back of his closet. A couple of these—a Matchbox Ford and a blue metal dumptruck Mr. Bider-man had sent home with his mom a few days after Bobby’s birth-day—were pretty cool, but he had nothing to rival Sully’s gasoline tanker or yellow Tonka bulldozer. T he ’dozer was especially good to play with in the sand. Bobby was looking forward to at least an hour’s serious roadbuilding while the waves broke nearby and his skin pinkened in the bright coastal sunshine. It occurred to him that he hadn’t gathered up his trucks like this since sometime last winter, when he and S-J had spent a happy post-blizzard Saturday afternoon making a road-system in the fresh snow down in Commonwealth Park. He was old now, eleven, almost too old for stuff like this. There was something sad about that idea, but he didn’t have to be sad right now, not if he didn’t want to. His toy-truck days might be fast approaching their end, but that end wouldn’t be today. Nope, not today.

His mother packed him a lunch for the trip, but she wouldn’t give him any money when he asked—not even a nickel for one of the pri-vate changing-stalls which lined the ocean side of the midway. And almost before Bobby realized it was happening, they were having what he most dreaded: an argument about money.

“Fifty cents’d be enough,” Bobby said. He heard the baby-whine in his voice, hated it, couldn’t stop it. “Just half a rock. Come on, Mom, what do you say? Be a sport.”

She lit a Kool, striking the match so hard it made a snapping sound, and looked at him through the smoke with her eyes nar-rowed. “You’re earning your own money now, Bob. Most people pay three cents for the paper and you get paid for reading it. A dollar a week! My God! When I was a girl—”

“Mom, that money’s for my bike! You know that.”

She had turned to the mirror, frowning and fussing at the shoul-ders of her blouse—Mr. Biderman had asked her to come in for a few hours even though it was Saturday. Now she turned back, cigarette still clamped between her lips, and bent her frown on him.

“You’re still asking me to buy you that bike, aren’t you? Still. I told you I couldn’t afford it but you’re still asking.”

“No, I’m not! I’m not either!” Bobby’s eyes were wide with anger and hurt. “Just a lousy half a rock for the—”

“Half a buck here, two bits there—it all adds up, you know. What you want is for me to buy you that bike by handing you the money for everything else. Then you don’t have to give up any of the other things you want.”

“That’s not fair!”

He knew what she would say before she said it, even had time to think that he had walked right into that one. “Life’s not fair, Bobby-O.” Turning back to the mirror for one final pluck at the ghost of a slip-strap hovering beneath the right shoulder of her blouse.

“A nickel for the changing-room?” Bobby asked. “Couldn’t you at least—”

“Yes, probably, oh I imagine,” she said, clipping off each word. She usually put rouge on her cheeks before going to work, but not all the color on her face this morning came out of a powderbox, and Bobby, angry as he was, knew he’d better be careful. If he lost his temper the way she was capable of losing hers, he’d be here in the hot empty apartment all day, forbidden to so much as step out into the hall.

His mother snatched her purse off the table by the end of the couch, butted out her cigarette hard enough to split the filter, then turned and looked at him. “If I said to you, ‘Gee, we can’t eat this week because I saw a pair of shoes at Hunsicker’s that I just had to have,’ what would you think?”

I’d think you were a liar, Bobby thought. And I’d say if you’re so broke, Mom, what about the Sears catalogue on the top shelf of your closet? The one with the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills—even a ten or two—taped to the underwear pages in the middle? What about the blue pitcher in the kitchen dish cabinet, the one tucked all the way in the back corner behind the gravy boat with the crack in it, the blue pitcher where you put your spare quarters, where you’ve been putting them ever since my father died? And when the pitcher’s full you roll the quarters and take them to the bank and get bills, and the bills go into the catalogue, don’t they? The bills get taped to the underwear pages of the wishbook.

But he said none of this, only looked down at his sneakers with his eyes burning.

“I have to make choices,” she said. “And if you’re old enough to work, sonnyboy of mine, you’ll have to make them, too. Do you think I like telling you no?”

Not exactly, Bobby thought, looking at his sneakers and biting at his lip, which wanted to loosen up and start letting out a bunch of blubbery baby-sounds. Not exactly, but I don’t think you really mind it, either.

“If we were the Gotrocks, I’d give you five dollars to spend at the beach—hell, ten! You wouldn’t have to borrow from your bike-jar if you wanted to take your little girlfriend on the Loop-the-Loop—”

She’s not my girlfriend! Bobby screamed at his mother inside his head. SHE IS NOT MYLITTLE GIRLFRIEND!

“—or the Indian Railroad. But of course if we were the Gotrocks, you wouldn’t need to save for a bike in the first place, would you?”

Her voice rising, rising. Whatever had been troubling her over the last few months threatening to come rushing out, foaming like sodapop and biting like acid. “I don’t know if you ever noticed this, but your father didn’t exactly leave us well off, and I’m doing the best I can. I feed you, I put clothes on your back, I paid for you to go to Sterling House this summer and play baseball while I push paper in that hot office. You got invited to go to the beach with the other kids, I’m very happy for you, but how you finance your day off is your business. If you want to ride the rides, take some of the money you’ve got in that jar and ride them. If you don’t, just play on the beach or stay home. Makes no difference to me. I just want you to stop whining. I hate it when you whine. It’s like . . .” She stopped, sighed, opened her purse, took out her cigarettes. “I hate it when you whine,” she repeated.

It’s like your father. That was what she had stopped herself from saying.

“So what’s the story, morning-glory?” she asked. “Are you finished?”

Bobby stood silent, cheeks burning, eyes burning, looking down at his sneakers and focusing all his will on not blubbering. At this point a single choked sob might be enough to get him grounded for the day; she was really mad, only looking for a reason to do it. And blubbering wasn’t the only danger. He wanted to scream at her that he’d rather be like his father than like her, a skinflinty old cheapskate like her, not good for even a lousy nickel, and so what if the late not-so-great Randall Garfield hadn’t left them well off? Why did she always make it sound like that was his fault? Who had married him?

“You sure, Bobby-O? No more smartass comebacks?” The most dangerous sound of all had come into her voice—a kind of brittle brightness. It sounded like good humor if you didn’t know her.

Bobby looked at his sneakers and said nothing. Kept all the blub-bering and all the angry words locked in his throat and said nothing. Silence spun out between them. He could smell her cigarette and all of last night’s cigarettes behind this one, and those smoked on all the other nights when she didn’t so much look at the TV as through it, waiting for the phone to ring.

“All right, I guess we’ve got ourselves straight,” she said after giv-ing him fifteen seconds or so to open his mouth and stick his big fat foot in it. “Have a nice day, Bobby.” She went out without kissing him.

Bobby went to the open window (tears were running down his face now, but he hardly noticed them), drew aside the curtain, and watched her head toward Commonwealth, high heels tapping. He took a cou-ple of big, watery breaths and then went into the kitchen. He looked across it at the cupboard where the blue pitcher hid behind the gravy boat. He could take some money out of it, she didn’t keep any exact count of how much was in there and she’d never miss three or four quarters, but he wouldn’t. Spending it would be joyless. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did; had known it even at nine, when he first discovered the pitcher of change hidden there. So, with feelings of regret rather than righteousness, he went into his bedroom and looked at the Bike Fund jar instead.

It occurred to him that she was right—he could take a little of his saved dough to spend at Savin Rock. It might take him an extra month to accumulate the price of the Schwinn, but at least spending this money would feel all right. And there was something else, as well. If he refused to take any money out of the jar, to do anything but hoard it and save it, he’d be like her.

That decided the matter. Bobby fished five dimes out of the Bike Fund, put them in his pocket, put a Kleenex on top of them to keep them from bouncing out if he ran somewhere, then finished collect-ing his stuff for the beach. Soon he was whistling, and Ted came downstairs to see what he was up to.

“Are you off, Captain Garfield?”

Bobby nodded. “Savin Rock’s a pretty cool place. Rides and stuff, you know?”

“Indeed I do. Have a good time, Bobby, and don’t fall out of anything.”

Bobby started for the door, then looked back at Ted, who was standing on the bottom step of the stairs in his slippers. “Why don’t you come out and sit on the porch?” Bobby asked. “It’s gonna be hot in the house, I bet.”

Ted smiled. “Perhaps. But I think I’ll stay in.”

“You okay?”

“Fine, Bobby. I’m fine.”

As he crossed to the Gerbers’ side of Broad Street, Bobby realized he felt sorry for Ted, hiding up in his hot room for no reason. And it had to be for no reason, didn’t it? Sure it did. Even if there were low men out there, cruising around someplace (in the west, he thought, they draw west), what could they want of an old retired guy like Ted Brautigan?

At first the quarrel with his mother weighed him down a little (Mrs. Gerber’s pudgy, pretty friend Rionda Hewson accused him of being “in a brown study,” whatever that was, then began tickling him up the sides and in the armpits until Bobby laughed in self-defense), but after they had been on the beach a little while he began to feel better, more himself.

Although it was still early in the season, Savin Rock was full speed ahead—the merry-go-round turning, the Wild Mouse roaring, the little kids screaming, tinny rock and roll pouring from the speakers outside the funhouse, the barkers hollering from their booths. Sully-John didn’t get the teddy bear he wanted, knocking over only two of the last three milk-bottles (Rionda claimed some of them had special weights in the bottom to keep them from going over unless you whacked them just right), but the guy in the baseball-toss booth awarded him a pretty neat prize anyway—a goofy-looking anteater covered with yellow plush. S-J impulsively gave it to Carol’s mom. Anita laughed and hugged him and told him he was the best kid in the world, if he was fifteen years older she’d commit bigamy and marry him. Sully-John blushed until he was purple.

Bobby tried the ringtoss and missed with all three throws. At the Shooting Gallery he had better luck, breaking two plates and win-ning a small stuffed bear. He gave it to Ian-the-Snot, who had actu-ally been good for a change—hadn’t thrown any tantrums, wet his pants, or tried to sock either Sully or Bobby in the nuts. Ian hugged the bear and looked at Bobby as if Bobby were God.

“It’s great and he loves it,” Anita said, “but don’t you want to take it home to your mother?”

“Nah—she’s not much on stuff like that. I’d like to win her a bot-tle of perfume, though.”

He and Sully-John dared each other to go on the Wild Mouse and finally went together, howling deliriously as their car plunged into each dip, simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately. They went on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Krazy Kups. Down to his last fifteen cents, Bobby found himself on the Ferris wheel with Carol. Their car stopped at the top, rocking slightly, making him feel funny in his stomach. To his left the Atlantic stepped shoreward in a series of white-topped waves. The beach was just as white, the ocean an impossible shade of deep blue. Sunlight ran across it like silk. Below them was the midway. Rising up from the speakers came the sound of Freddy Cannon: she comes from Tal-lahassee, she’s got a hi-fi chassis.

“Everything down there looks so little,” Carol said. Her voice was also little—uncharacteristically so.

“Don’t be scared, we’re safe as can be. The Ferris wheel would be a kiddie-ride if it didn’t go so high.”

Carol was in many ways the oldest of the three of them—tough and sure of herself, as on the day she had made S-J carry her books for swearing—but now her face had almost become a baby’s face again: round, a little bit pale, dominated by a pair of alarmed blue eyes. Without thinking Bobby leaned over, put his mouth on hers, and kissed her. When he drew back, her eyes were wider than ever.

“Safe as can be,” he said, and grinned.

“Do it again!” It was her first real kiss, she had gotten it at Savin Rock on the first Saturday of summer vacation, and she hadn’t been paying attention. That was what she was thinking, that was why she wanted him to do it again.

“I better not,” Bobby said. Although . . . up here who was there to see and call him a sissy?

“I dare you, and don’t say dares go first.”

“Will you tell?”

“No, swear to God. Go on, hurry up! Before we go down!”

So he kissed her again. Her lips were smooth and closed, hot with the sun. Then the wheel began to move and he stopped. For just a moment Carol laid her head against his chest. “Thank you, Bobby,” she said. “That was nice as could be.”

“I thought so, too.”

They drew apart from each other a little, and when their car stopped and the tattooed attendant swung the safety bar up, Bobby got out and ran without looking back at her to where S-J was stand-ing. Yet he knew already that kissing Carol at the top of the Ferris wheel was going to be the best part of the day. It was his first real kiss, too, and Bobby never forgot the feel of her lips pressing on his— dry and smooth and warmed by the sun. It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

Around three o’clock, Mrs. Gerber told them to start gathering their things; it was time to go home. Carol gave a token “Aw, Mom,” and then started picking stuff up. Her girlfriends helped; even Ian helped a little (refusing even as he fetched and carried to let go of the sand-matted bear). Bobby had half-expected Carol to tag after him for the rest of the day, and he had been sure she’d tell her girlfriends about kissing on the Ferris wheel (he would know she had when he saw them in a little knot, giggling with their hands over their mouths, looking at him with their merry knowing eyes), but she had done neither. Several times he had caught her looking at him, though, and several times he had caught himself sneaking glances at her. He kept remembering her eyes up there. How big and worried they had been. And he had kissed her, just like that. Bingo.

Bobby and Sully toted most of the beachbags. “Good mules! Gid-dyap!” Rionda cried, laughing, as they mounted the steps between the beach and the boardwalk. She was lobster red under the cold-cream she had smeared over her face and shoulders, and she moaned to Anita Gerber that she wouldn’t sleep a wink that night, that if the sunburn didn’t keep her awake, the midway food would.

“Well, you didn’t have to eat four wieners and two doughboys,” Mrs. Gerber said, sounding more irritated than Bobby had ever heard her—she was tired, he reckoned. He felt a little dazed by the sun himself. His back prickled with sunburn and he had sand in his socks. The beachbags with which he was festooned swung and bounced against each other.

“But amusement park food’s so gooood,” Rionda protested in a sad voice. Bobby laughed. He couldn’t help it.

They walked slowly along the midway toward the dirt parking lot, paying no attention to the rides now. The barkers looked at them, then looked past them for fresh blood. Folks loaded down and trudging back to the parking lot were, by and large, lost causes.

At the very end of the midway, on the left, was a skinny man wear-ing baggy blue Bermuda shorts, a strap-style undershirt, and a bowler hat. The bowler was old and faded, but cocked at a rakish angle. Also, there was a plastic sunflower stuck in the brim. He was a funny guy, and the girls finally got their chance to put their hands over their mouths and giggle.

He looked at them with the air of a man who has been giggled at by experts and smiled back. This made Carol and her friends giggle harder. The man in the bowler hat, still smiling, spread his hands above the makeshift table behind which he was standing—a slab of fiberboard on two bright orange sawhorses. On the fiberboard were three redbacked Bicycle cards. He turned them over with quick, graceful gestures. His fingers were long and perfectly white, Bobby saw—not a bit of sun-color on them.

The card in the middle was the queen of hearts. The man in the bowler picked it up, showed it to them, walked it dextrously back and forth between his fingers. “Find the lady in red, cherchez la femme rouge, that’s what it’s all about and all you have to do,” he said. “It’s easy as can beezy, easy-Japaneezy, easy as knitting kitten-britches.” He beckoned Yvonne Loving. “Come on over here, doll-face, and show em how it’s done.”

Yvonne, still giggling and blushing to the roots of her black hair, shrank back against Rionda and murmured that she had no more money for games, it was all spent.

“Not a problem,” the man in the bowler hat said. “It’s just a demonstration, dollface—I want your mom and her pretty friend to see how easy it is.”

“Neither one’s my mom,” Yvonne said, but she stepped forward.

“We really ought to get going if we’re going to beat the traffic, Evvie,” Mrs. Gerber said.

“No, wait a minute, this is fun,” Rionda said. “It’s three-card monte. Looks easy, just like he says, but if you’re not careful you start chasing and go home dead broke.”

The man in the bowler gave her a reproachful look, then a broad and engaging grin. It was the grin of a low man, Bobby thought suddenly. Not one of those Ted was afraid of, but a low man, just the same.

“It’s obvious to me,” said the man in the bowler, “that at some point in your past you have been the victim of a scoundrel. Although how anyone could be cruel enough to mistreat such a beautiful classy dame is beyond my ability to comprehend.”

The beautiful classy dame—five-five or so, two hundred pounds or so, shoulders and face slathered with Pond’s—laughed happily. “Stow the guff and show the child how it works. And are you really telling me this is legal?”

The man behind the table tossed his head back and also laughed. “At the ends of the midway everything’s legal until they catch you and throw you out . . . as I think you probably know. Now . . . what’s your name, dollface?”

“Yvonne,” she said in a voice Bobby could barely hear. Beside him, Sully-John was watching with great interest. “Sometimes folks call me Evvie.”

“Okay, Evvie, look right here, pretty baby. What do you see? Tell me their names—I know you can, a smart kid like you—and point when you tell. Don’t be afraid to touch, either. There’s nothing crooked here.”

“This one on the end is the jack . . . this one on the other end is the king . . . and this is the queen. She’s in the middle.”

“That’s it, dollface. In the cards as in life, there is so often a woman between two men. That’s their power, and in another five or six years you’ll find it out for yourself.” His voice had fallen into a low, almost hypnotic chanting. “Now watch closely and never take your eyes from the cards.” He turned them over so their backs showed. “Now, dollface, where’s the queen?”

Yvonne Loving pointed at the red back in the middle.

“Is she right?” the man in the bowler asked the little party gath-ered around his table.

“So far,” Rionda said, and laughed so hard her uncorseted belly jig-gled under her sundress.

Smiling at her laughter, the low man in the bowler hat flicked one corner of the middle card, showing the red queen. “One hundred per cent keerect, sweetheart, so far so good. Now watch! Watch close! It’s a race between your eye and my hand! Which will win? That’s the question of the day!”

He began to scramble the three cards rapidly about on his plank table, chanting as he did so.

“Up and down, all around, in and out, all about, to and fro, watch em go, now they’re back, they’re side by side, so tell me, dollface, where’s she hide?”

As Yvonne studied the three cards, which were indeed once more lined up side by side, Sully leaned close to Bobby’s ear and said, “You don’t even have to watch him mix them around. The queen’s got a bent corner. Do you see it?”

Bobby nodded, and thought Good girl when Yvonne pointed hes-itantly to the card on the far left—the one with the bent corner. The man in the bowler turned it over and revealed the queen of hearts.

“Good job!” he said. “You’ve a sharp eye, dollface, a sharp eye indeed.”

“Thank you,” Yvonne said, blushing and looking almost as happy as Carol had looked when Bobby kissed her.

“If you’d bet me a dime on that go, I’d be giving you back twenty cents right now,” the man in the bowler hat said. “Why, you ask? Because it’s Saturday, and I call Saturday Twoferday! Now would one of you ladies like to risk a dime in a race between your young eyes and my tired old hands? You can tell your husbands—lucky fellas they are to have you, too, may I say—that Mr. Herb McQuown, the Monte Man at Savin Rock, paid for your day’s parking. Or what about a quarter? Point out the queen of hearts and I give you back fifty cents.”

“Half a rock, yeah!” Sully-John said. “I got a quarter, mister, and you’re on.”

“Johnny, it’s gambling,” Carol’s mother said doubtfully. “I don’t really think I should allow—”

“Go on, let the kid learn a lesson,” Rionda said. “Besides, the guy may let him win. Suck the rest of us in.” She made no effort to lower her voice, but the man in the bowler—Mr. McQuown—only looked at her and smiled. Then he returned his attention to S-J.

“Let’s see your money, kid—come on, pony up.”

Sully-John handed over his quarter. McQuown raised it into the afternoon sunlight for a moment, one eye closed.

“Yeh, looks like a good ’un to me,” he said, and planked it down on the board to the left of the three-card lineup. He looked in both directions—for cops, maybe—then tipped the cynically smiling Rionda a wink before turning his attention back to Sully-John. “What’s your name, fella?”

“John Sullivan.”

McQuown widened his eyes and tipped his bowler to the other side of his head, making the plastic sunflower nod and bend comi-cally. “A name of note! You know what I refer to?”

“Sure. Someday maybe I’ll be a fighter, too,” S-J said. He hooked a left and then a right at the air over McQuown’s makeshift table. “Pow, pow!”

“Pow-pow indeed,” said McQuown. “And how’s your eyes, Master Sullivan?”

“Pretty good.”

“Then get them ready, because the race is on! Yes it is! Your eyes against my hands! Up and down, all around, where’d she go, I don’t know.” The cards, which had moved much faster this time, slowed to a stop.

Sully started to point, then drew his hand back, frowning. Now there were two cards with little folds in the corner. Sully looked up at McQuown, whose arms were folded across his dingy undershirt. McQuown was smiling. “Take your time, son,” he said. “T he morn-ing was whizbang, but it’s been a slow afternoon.”

Men who think hats with feathers in the brims are sophisticated, Bobby remembered Ted saying. The sort of men who’d shoot craps in an alley and pass around a bottle of liquor in a paper bag during the game. McQuown had a funny plastic flower in his hat instead of a feather, and there was no bottle in evidence . . . but there was one in his pocket. A little one. Bobby was sure of it. And toward the end of the day, as business wound down and totally sharp hand-eye coordi-nation became less of a priority to him, McQuown would take more and more frequent nips from it.

Sully pointed to the card on the far right. No, S-J, Bobby thought, and when McQuown turned that card up, it was the king of spades. McQuown turned up the card on the far left and showed the jack of clubs. The queen was back in the middle. “Sorry, son, a little slow that time, it ain’t no crime. Want to try again now that you’re warmed up?”

“Gee, I . . . that was the last of my dough.” Sully-John looked crestfallen.

“Just as well for you, kid,” Rionda said. “He’d take you for every-thing you own and leave you standing here in your shortie-shorts.” The girls giggled wildly at this; S-J blushed. Rionda took no notice of either. “I worked at Revere Beach for quite awhile when I lived in Mass,” she said. “Let me show you kids how this works. Want to go for a buck, pal? Or is that too sweet for you?”

“In your presence everything would be sweet,” McQuown said sentimentally, and snatched her dollar the moment it was out of her purse. He held it up to the light, examined it with a cold eye, then set it down to the left of the cards. “Looks like a good ’un,” he said. “Let’s play, darling. What’s your name?”

“Pudd’ntane,” Rionda said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

“Ree, don’t you think—” Anita Gerber began.

“I told you, I’m wise to the gaff,” Rionda said. “Run em, my pal.”

“Without delay,” McQuown agreed, and his hands blurred the three red-backed cards into motion (up and down, all around, to and fro, watch them go), finally settling them in a line of three again. And this time, Bobby observed with amazement, all three cards had those slightly bent corners.

Rionda’s little smile had gone. She looked from the short row of cards to McQuown, then down at the cards again, and then at her dollar bill, lying off to one side and fluttering slightly in the little seabreeze that had come up. Finally she looked back at McQuown. “You suckered me, pally,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“No,” McQuown said. “I raced you. Now . . . what do you say?”

“I think I say that was a real good dollar that didn’t make no trou-ble and I’m sorry to see it go,” Rionda replied, and pointed to the middle card.

McQuown turned it over, revealed the king, and made Rionda’s dollar disappear into his pocket. This time the queen was on the far left. McQuown, a dollar and a quarter richer, smiled at the folks from Harwich. The plastic flower tucked into the brim of his hat nodded to and fro in the salt-smelling air. “Who’s next?” he asked. “Who wants to race his eye against my hand?”

“I think we’re all raced out,” Mrs. Gerber said. She gave the man behind the table a thin smile, then put one hand on her daughter’s shoulder and the other on her sleepy-eyed son’s, turning them away.

“Mrs. Gerber?” Bobby asked. For just a moment he considered how his mother, once married to a man who had never met an inside straight he didn’t like, would feel if she could see her son standing here at Mr. McQuown’s slapdash table with that risky Randy Garfield red hair gleaming in the sun. The thought made him smile a little. Bobby knew what an inside straight was now; flushes and full houses, too. He had made inquiries. “May I try?”

“Oh, Bobby, I really think we’ve had enough, don’t you?”

Bobby reached under the Kleenex he had stuffed into his pocket and brought out his last three nickels. “All I have is this,” he said, showing first Mrs. Gerber and then Mr. McQuown. “Is it enough?”

“Son,” McQuown said, “I have played this game for pennies and enjoyed it.”

Mrs. Gerber looked at Rionda.

“Ah, hell,” Rionda said, and pinched Bobby’s cheek. “It’s the price of a haircut, for Christ’s sake. Let him lose it and then we’ll go home.”

“All right, Bobby,” Mrs. Gerber said, and sighed. “If you have to.”

“Put those nickels down here, Bob, where we can all look at em,” said McQuown. “They look like good ’uns to me, yes indeed. Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“Then here we go. Two boys and a girl go into hiding together. The boys are worthless. Find the girl and double your money.”

The pale dextrous fingers turned the three cards over. McQuown spieled and the cards blurred. Bobby watched them move about the table but made no real effort to track the queen. That wasn’t necessary.

“Now they go, now they slow, now they rest, here’s the test.” The three red-backed cards were in a line again. “Tell me, Bobby, where’s she hide?”

“There,” Bobby said, and pointed to the far left.

Sully groaned. “It’s the middle card, you jerk. This time I never took my eye off it.”

McQuown took no notice of Sully. He was looking at Bobby. Bobby looked back at him. After a moment McQuown reached out and turned over the card Bobby had pointed at. It was the queen of hearts.

“What the heck?” Sully cried.

Carol clapped excitedly and jumped up and down. Rionda Hew-son squealed and smacked him on the back. “You took im to school that time, Bobby! Attaboy!”

McQuown gave Bobby a peculiar, thoughtful smile, then reached into his pocket and brought out a fistful of change. “Not bad, son. First time I’ve been beat all day. That I didn’t let myself get beat, that is.” He picked out a quarter and a nickel and put them down beside Bobby’s fifteen cents. “Like to let it ride?” He saw Bobby didn’t understand. “Like to go again?”

“May I?” Bobby asked Anita Gerber.

“Wouldn’t you rather quit while you’re ahead?” she asked, but her eyes were sparkling and she seemed to have forgotten all about beat-ing the traffic home.

“I am going to quit while I’m ahead,” he told her.

McQuown laughed. “A boasty boy! Won’t be able to grow a single chin-whisker for another five years, but he’s a boasty boy already. Well then, Boasty Bobby, what do you think? Are we on for the game?”

“Sure,” Bobby said. If Carol or Sully-John had accused him of boasting, he would have protested strongly—all his heroes, from John Wayne to Lucky Starr of the Space Patrol, were modest fellows, the kind to say “Shucks” after saving a world or a wagon train. But he felt no need to defend himself to Mr. McQuown, who was a low man in blue shorts and maybe a card-cheater as well. Boasting had been the furthest thing from Bobby’s mind. He didn’t think this was much like his dad’s inside straights, either. Inside straights were all hope and guesswork—“fool’s poker,” according to Charlie Yearman, the Harwich Elementary janitor, who had been happy to tell Bobby everything about the game that S-J and Denny Rivers hadn’t known—but there was no guesswork about this.

Mr. McQuown looked at him a moment longer; Bobby’s calm confidence seemed to trouble him. Then he reached up, adjusted the slant of his bowler, stretched out his arms, and wiggled his fingers like Bugs Bunny before he played the piano at Carnegie Hall in one of the Merrie Melodies. “Get on your mark, boasty boy. I’m giving you the whole business this time, from the soup to the nuts.”

The cards blurred into a kind of pink film. From behind him Bobby heard Sully-John mutter “Holy crow!” Carol’s friend Tina said “That’s too fast” in an amusing tone of prim disapproval. Bobby again watched the cards move, but only because he felt it was expected of him. Mr. McQuown didn’t bother with any patter this time, which was sort of a relief.

The cards settled. McQuown looked at Bobby with his eyebrows raised. There was a little smile on his mouth, but he was breathing fast and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip.

Bobby pointed immediately to the card on the right. “That’s her.”

“How do you know that?” Mr. McQuown asked, his smile fading. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I just do,” Bobby said.

Instead of flipping the card, McQuown turned his head slightly and looked down the midway. The smile had been replaced by a petulant expression—downturned lips and a crease between his eyes. Even the plastic sunflower in his hat seemed displeased, its to-and-fro bob now sulky instead of jaunty. “No one beats that shuffle,” he said. “No one has ever beaten that shuffle.”

Rionda reached over Bobby’s shoulder and flipped the card he had pointed at. It was the queen of hearts. This time all the kids clapped. The sound made the crease between Mr. McQuown’s eyes deepen.

“The way I figure, you owe old Boasty Bobby here ninety cents,” Rionda said. “Are you gonna pay?”

“Suppose I don’t?” Mr. McQuown asked, turning his frown on Rionda. “What are you going to do, tubbo? Call a cop?”

“Maybe we ought to just go,” Anita Gerber said, sounding nervous.

“Call a cop? Not me,” Rionda said, ignoring Anita. She never took her eyes off McQuown. “A lousy ninety cents out of your pocket and you look like Baby Huey with a load in his pants. Jesus wept!”

Except, Bobby knew, it wasn’t the money. Mr. McQuown had lost a lot more than this on occasion. Sometimes when he lost it was a “hustle”; sometimes it was an “out.” What he was steamed about now was the shuffle. McQuown hadn’t liked a kid beating his shuffle.

“What I’ll do,” Rionda continued, “is tell anybody on the midway who wants to know that you’re a cheapskate. Ninety-Cent McQuown, I’ll call you. Think that’ll help your business?”

“I’d like to give you the business,” Mr. McQuown growled, but he reached into his pocket, brought out another dip of change—a big-ger one this time—and quickly counted out Bobby’s winnings.

“There,” he said. “Ninety cents. Go buy yourself a martini.”

“I really just guessed, you know,” Bobby said as he swept the coins into his hand and then shoved them into his pocket, where they hung like a weight. The argument that morning with his mother now seemed exquisitely stupid. He was going home with more money than he had come with, and it meant nothing. Nothing. “I’m a good guesser.”

Mr. McQuown relaxed. He wouldn’t have hurt them in any case— he might be a low man but he wasn’t the kind who hurt people; he’d never subject those clever long-fingered hands to the indignity of forming a fist—but Bobby didn’t want to leave him unhappy. He wanted what Mr. McQuown himself would have called an “out.”

“Yeah,” McQuown said. “A good guesser is what you are. Like to try a third guess, Bobby? Riches await.”

“We really have to be going,” Mrs. Gerber said hastily.

“And if I tried again I’d lose,” Bobby said. “Thank you, Mr. McQuown. It was a good game.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get lost, kid.” Mr. McQuown was like all the other midway barkers now, looking farther down the line. Looking for fresh blood.

Going home, Carol and her girlfriends kept looking at him with awe; Sully-John, with a kind of puzzled respect. It made Bobby feel uncomfortable. At one point Rionda turned around and regarded him closely. “You didn’t just guess,” she said.

Bobby looked at her cautiously, withholding comment.

“You had a winkle.”

“What’s a winkle?”

“My dad wasn’t much of a betting man, but every now and then he’d get a hunch about a number. He called it a winkle. Then he’d bet. Once he won fifty dollars. Bought us groceries for a whole month. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Bobby said. “Maybe I had a winkle.”

When he got home, his mom was sitting on the porch glider with her legs folded under her. She had changed into her Saturday pants and was looking moodily out at the street. She waved briefly to Carol’s mom as she drove away; watched as Anita turned into her own driveway and Bobby trudged up the walk. He knew what his mom was thinking: Mrs. Gerber’s husband was in the Navy, but at least she had a husband. Also, Anita Gerber had an Estate Wagon. Liz had shank’s mare, the bus if she had to go a little farther, or a taxi if she needed to go into Bridgeport.

But Bobby didn’t think she was angry at him anymore, and that was good.

“Did you have a nice time at Savin, Bobby?”

“Super time,” he said, and thought: What is it, Mom? You don’t care what kind of time I had at the beach. What’s really on your mind? But he couldn’t tell.

“Good. Listen, kiddo . . . I’m sorry we got into an argument this morning. I hate working on Saturdays.” This last came out almost in a spit.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

She touched his cheek and shook her head. “That fair skin of yours! You’ll never tan, Bobby-O. Not you. Come on in and I’ll put some Baby Oil on that sunburn.”

He followed her inside, took off his shirt, and stood in front of her as she sat on the couch and smeared the fragrant Baby Oil on his back and arms and neck—even on his cheeks. It felt good, and he thought again how much he loved her, how much he loved to be touched by her. He wondered what she would think if she knew he had kissed Carol on the Ferris wheel. Would she smile? Bobby didn’t think she would smile. And if she knew about McQuown and the cards—

“I haven’t seen your pal from upstairs,” she said, recapping the Baby Oil bottle. “I know he’s up there because I can hear the Yankees game on his radio, but wouldn’t you think he’d go out on the porch where it’s cool?”

“I guess he doesn’t feel like it,” Bobby said. “Mom, are you okay?”

She looked at him, startled. “Fine, Bobby.” She smiled and Bobby smiled back. It took an effort, because he didn’t think his mom was fine at all. In fact he was pretty sure she wasn’t.

He just had a winkle.

That night Bobby lay on his back with his heels spread to the corners of the bed, eyes open and looking up at the ceiling. His window was open, too, the curtains drifting back and forth in a breath of a breeze, and from some other open window came the sound of The Platters: “Here, in the afterglow of day, We keep our rendezvous, beneath the blue.” Farther away was the drone of an airplane, the honk of a horn.

Rionda’s dad had called it a winkle, and once he’d hit the daily number for fifty dollars. Bobby had agreed with her—a winkle, sure, I had a winkle—but he couldn’t have picked a lottery number to save his soul. The thing was . . .

The thing was Mr. McQuown knew where the queen ended up every time, and so I knew.

Once Bobby realized that, other things fell into place. Obvious stuff, really, but he’d been having fun, and . . . well . . . you didn’t question what you knew, did you? You might question a winkle—a feeling that came to you right out of the blue—but you didn’t ques-tion knowing.

Except how did he know his mother was taping money into the underwear pages of the Sears catalogue on the top shelf of her closet? How did he even know the catalogue was up there? She’d never told him about it. She’d never told him about the blue pitcher where she put her quarters, either, but of course he had known about that for years, he wasn’t blind even though he had an idea she sometimes thought he was. But the catalogue? The quarters rolled and changed into bills, the bills then taped into the catalogue? There was no way he could know about a thing like that, but as he lay here in his bed, listening while “Earth Angel” replaced “Twi-light Time,” he knew that the catalogue was there. He knew because she knew, and it had crossed the front part of her mind. And on the Ferris wheel he had known Carol wanted him to kiss her again because it had been her first real kiss from a boy and she hadn’t been paying enough attention; it had been over before she was completely aware it was happening. But knowing that wasn’t knowing the future.

“No, it’s just reading minds,” he whispered, and then shivered all over as if his sunburn had turned to ice.

Watch out, Bobby-O—if you don’t watch out you’ll wind up as nuts as Ted with his low men.

Far off, in the town square, the clock began bonging the hour of ten. Bobby turned his head and looked at the alarm clock on his desk. Big Ben claimed it was only nine-fifty-two.

All right, so the clock downtown is a little fast or mine is a little slow. Big deal, McNeal. Go to sleep.

He didn’t think he could do that for at least awhile, but it had been quite a day—arguments with mothers, money won from three-card monte dealers, kisses at the top of the Ferris wheel—and he began to drift in a pleasant fashion.

Maybe she is my girlfriend, Bobby thought. Maybe she’s my girl-friend after all.

With the last premature bong of the town square clock still fading in the air, Bobby fell asleep.

V. BOBBY READS THE PAPER. BROWN, WITH A WHITE BIB. A BIG CHANCE FOR LIZ. CAMP BROAD STREET. AN UNEASY WEEK. OFF TO PROVIDENCE.

On Monday, after his mom had gone to work, Bobby went upstairs to read Ted the paper (although his eyes were actually good enough to do it himself, Ted said he had come to enjoy the sound of Bobby’s voice and the luxury of being read to while he shaved). Ted stood in his lit-tle bathroom with the door open, scraping foam from his face, while Bobby tried him on various headlines from the various sections.

“VIETSKIRMISHES INTENSIFY?”

“Before breakfast? Thanks but no thanks.”

“CARTS CORRALLED, LOCAL MAN ARRESTED?”

“First paragraph, Bobby.”

“ ‘When police showed up at his Pond Lane residence late yester-day, John T. Anderson of Harwich told them all about his hobby, which he claims is collecting supermarket shopping carts. “He was very interesting on the subject,” said Officer Kirby Malloy of the Harwich P.D., “but we weren’t entirely satisfied that he’d come by some of the carts in his collection honestly.” Turns out Malloy was “right with Eversharp.” Of the more than fifty shopping carts in Mr. Anderson’s back yard, at least twenty had been stolen from the Har-wich A&P and Total Grocery. T here were even a few carts from the IGA market in Stansbury.’ ”

“Enough,” Ted said, rinsing his razor under hot water and then raising the blade to his lathered neck. “Galumphing small-town humor in response to pathetic acts of compulsive larceny.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Mr. Anderson sounds like a man suffering from a neurosis—a mental problem, in other words. Do you think mental problems are funny?”

“Gee, no. I feel bad for people with loose screws.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so. I’ve known people whose screws were not just loose but entirely missing. A good many such people, in fact. They are often pathetic, sometimes awe-inspiring, and occasionally terrifying, but they are not funny. CARTS CORRALLED, indeed. What else is there?”

“STARLET KILLED IN EUROPEAN ROAD ACCIDENT?”

“Ugh, no.”

“YANKEES ACQUIRE INFIELDER IN TRADE WITH SENATORS?”

“Nothing the Yankees do with the Senators interests me.”

“ALBINI RELISHES UNDERDOG ROLE?”

“Yes, please read that.”

Ted listened closely as he painstakingly shaved his throat. Bobby himself found the story less than riveting—it wasn’t about Floyd Patterson or Ingemar Johansson, after all (Sully called the Swedish heavyweight “Ingie-Baby”)—but he read it carefully, nevertheless. The twelve-rounder between Tommy “Hurricane” Haywood and Eddie Albini was scheduled for Madison Square Garden on Wednes-day night of the following week. Both fighters had good records, but age was considered an important, perhaps telling factor: Haywood, twenty-three to Eddie Albini’s thirty-six, and a heavy favorite. The winner might get a shot at the heavyweight title in the fall, probably around the time Richard Nixon won the Presidency (Bobby’s mom said that was sure to happen, and a good thing—never mind that Kennedy was a Catholic, he was just too young, and apt to be a hot-head).

In the article Albini said he could understand why he was the underdog—he was getting up in years a little and some folks thought he was past it because he’d lost by a TKO to Sugar Boy Masters in his last fight. And sure, he knew that Haywood out-reached him and was supposed to be mighty savvy for a younger fel-low. But he’d been training hard, Albini said, skipping a lot of rope and sparring with a guy who moved and jabbed like Haywood. The article was full of words like game and determined; Albini was described as being “full of grit.” Bobby could tell the writer thought Albini was going to get the stuffing knocked out of him and felt sorry for him. Hurricane Haywood hadn’t been available to talk to the reporter, but his manager, a fellow named I. Kleindienst (Ted told Bobby how to pronounce the name), said it was likely to be Eddie Albini’s last fight. “He had his day, but his day is over,”

I. Kleindienst said. “If Eddie goes six, I’m going to send my boy to bed without his supper.”

“Irving Kleindienst’s a ka-mai,” Ted said.

“A what?”

“A fool.” Ted was looking out the window toward the sound of Mrs. O’Hara’s dog. Not totally blank the way he sometimes went blank, but distant.

“You know him?” Bobby asked.

“No, no,” Ted said. He seemed first startled by the idea, then amused. “Know of him.” 98 “It sounds to me like this guy Albini’s gonna get creamed.”

“You never know. That’s what makes it interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Go to the comics, Bobby. I want Flash Gordon. And be sure to tell me what Dale Arden’s wearing.”

“Why?”

“Because I think she’s a real hotsy-totsy,” Ted said, and Bobby burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Sometimes Ted was a real card.

A day later, on his way back from Sterling House, where he had just filled out the rest of his forms for summer baseball, Bobby came upon a carefully printed poster thumbtacked to an elm in Common-wealth Park.

PLEASE HELP US FIND PHIL!PHIL is our WELSH CORGI!PHIL is 7 YRS. OLD!PHIL is BROWN, with a WHITE BIB!His EYES are BRIGHT & INTELLIGENT!The TIPS OF HIS EARS are BLACK!Will bring you a BALL if you say HURRY UP PHIL!CALL HOusitonic 5-8337!(OR)BRING to 745 Highgate Avenue!Home of THE SAGAMORE FAMILY!

There was no picture of Phil.

Bobby stood looking at the poster for a fair length of time. Part of him wanted to run home and tell Ted—not only about this but about the star and crescent moon he’d seen chalked beside the hopscotch grid. Another part pointed out that there was all sorts of stuff posted in the park—he could see a sign advertising a concert in the town square posted on another elm right across from where he was stand-ing—and he would be nuts to get Ted going about this. T hese two thoughts contended with each other until they felt like two sticks rubbing together and his brain in danger of catching on fire.

I won’t think about it, he told himself, stepping back from the poster. And when a voice from deep within his mind—a dangerously adult voice—protested that he was being paid to think about stuff like this, to tell about stuff like this, Bobby told the voice to just shut up. And the voice did.

When he got home, his mother was sitting on the porch glider again, this time mending the sleeve of a housedress. She looked up and Bobby saw the puffy skin beneath her eyes, the reddened lids. She had a Kleenex folded into one hand.

“Mom—?”

What’s wrong? was how the thought finished . . . but finishing it would be unwise. Would likely cause trouble. Bobby had had no recurrence of his brilliant insights on the day of the trip to Savin Rock, but he knew her—the way she looked at him when she was upset, the way the hand with the Kleenex in it tensed, almost becoming a fist, the way she drew in breath and sat up straighter, ready to give you a fight if you wanted to go against her.

“What?” she asked him. “Got something on your mind besides your hair?”

“No,” he said. His voice sounded awkward and oddly shy to his own ears. “I was at Sterling House. The lists are up for baseball. I’m a Wolf again this summer.”

She nodded and relaxed a little. “I’m sure you’ll make the Lions next year.” She moved her sewing basket from the glider to the porch floor, then patted the empty place. “Sit down here beside me a minute, Bobby. I’ve got something to tell you.”

Bobby sat with a feeling of trepidation—she’d been crying, after all, and she sounded quite grave—but it turned out not to be a big deal, at least as far as he could see.

“Mr. Biderman—Don—has invited me to go with him and Mr. Cushman and Mr. Dean to a seminar in Providence. It’s a big chance for me.”

“What’s a seminar?”

“A sort of conference—people get together to learn about a sub-ject and discuss it. This one is Real Estate in the Sixties. I was very surprised that Don would invite me. Bill Cushman and Curtis Dean, of course I knew they’d be going, they’re agents. But for Don to ask me . . .” She trailed off for a moment, then turned to Bobby and smiled. He thought it was a genuine smile, but it went oddly with her reddened lids. “I’ve wanted to become an agent myself for the longest time, and now this, right out of the blue . . . it’s a big chance for me, Bobby, and it could mean a big change for us.”

Bobby knew his mom wanted to sell real estate. She had books on the subject and read a little out of them almost every night, often underlining parts. But if it was such a big chance, why had it made her cry?

“Well, that’s good,” he said. “The ginchiest. I hope you learn a lot. When is it?”

“Next week. The four of us leave early Tuesday morning and get back Thursday night around eight o’clock. All the meetings are at the Warwick Hotel, and that’s where we’ll be staying—Don’s booked the rooms. I haven’t stayed in a hotel room for twelve years, I guess. I’m a little nervous.”

Did nervous make you cry? Bobby wondered. Maybe so, if you were a grownup—especially a female grownup.

“I want you to ask S-J if you can stay with him Tuesday and Wednesday night. I’m sure Mrs. Sullivan—”

Bobby shook his head. “That won’t work.”

“Whyever not?” Liz bent a fierce look at him. “Mrs. Sullivan has-n’t ever minded you staying over before. You haven’t gotten into her bad books somehow, have you?”

“No, Mom. It’s just that S-J won a week at Camp Winnie.” The sound of all those W’s coming out of his mouth made him feel like smiling, but he held it in. His mother was still looking at him in that fierce way . . . and wasn’t there a kind of panic in that look? Panic or something like it?

“What’s Camp Winnie? What are you talking about?”

Bobby explained about S-J winning the free week at Camp Winiwinaia and how Mrs. Sullivan was going to visit her parents in Wis-consin at the same time—plans which had now been finalized, Big Gray Dog and all.

“Damn it, that’s just my luck,” his mom said. She almost never swore, said that cursing and what she called “dirty talk” was the lan-guage of the ignorant. Now she made a fist and struck the arm of the glider. “God damn it!”

She sat for a moment, thinking. Bobby thought, as well. His only other close friend on the street was Carol, and he doubted his mom would call Anita Gerber and ask if he could stay over there. Carol was a girl, and somehow that made a difference when it came to sleepovers. One of his mother’s friends? The thing was she didn’t really have any . . . except for Don Biderman (and maybe the other two that were going to the seminar in Providence). Plenty of acquaintances, people she said hi to if they were walking back from the supermarket or going to a Friday-night movie downtown, but no one she could call up and ask to keep her eleven-year-old son for a couple of nights; no relatives, either, at least none that Bobby knew of.

Like people travelling on converging roads, Bobby and his mother gradually drew toward the same point. Bobby got there first, if only by a second or two.

“What about Ted?” he asked, then almost clapped his hand over his mouth. It actually rose out of his lap a little.

His mother watched the hand settle back with a return of her old cynical half-smile, the one she wore when dispensing sayings like You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die and Two men looked out through prison bars, one saw the mud and one saw the stars and of course that all-time favorite, Life’s not fair.

“You think I don’t know you call him Ted when the two of you are together?” she asked. “You must think I’ve been taking stupid-pills, Bobby-O.” She sat and looked out at the street. A Chrysler New Yorker slid slowly past—finny, fenderskirted, and highlighted with chrome. Bobby watched it go by. The man behind the wheel was elderly and white-haired and wearing a blue jacket. Bobby thought he was probably all right. Old but not low.

“Maybe it’d work,” Liz said at last. She spoke musingly, more to herself than to her son. “Let’s go talk to Brautigan and see.”

Following her up the stairs to the third floor, Bobby wondered how long she had known how to say Ted’s name correctly. A week? A month?

From the start, Dumbo, he thought. From the very first day.

Bobby’s initial idea was that Ted could stay in his own room on the third floor while Bobby stayed in the apartment on the first floor; they’d both keep their doors open, and if either of them needed any-thing, they could call.

“I don’t believe the Kilgallens or the Proskys would enjoy you yelling up to Mr. Brautigan at three o’clock in the morning that you’d had a nightmare,” Liz said tartly. The Kilgallens and the Proskys had the two small second-floor apartments; Liz and Bobby were friendly with neither of them.

“I won’t have any nightmares,” Bobby said, deeply humiliated to be treated like a little kid. “I mean jeepers.”

“Keep it to yourself,” his mom said. They were sitting at Ted’s kitchen table, the two adults smoking, Bobby with a rootbeer in front of him.

“It’s just not the right idea,” Ted told him. “You’re a good kid, Bobby, responsible and levelheaded, but eleven’s too young to be on your own, I think.”

Bobby found it easier to be called too young by his friend than by his mother. Also he had to admit that it might be spooky to wake up in one of those little hours after midnight and go to the bathroom knowing he was the only person in the apartment. He could do it, he had no doubt he could do it, but yeah, it would be spooky.

“What about the couch?” he asked. “It pulls out and makes a bed, doesn’t it?” They had never used it that way, but Bobby was sure she’d told him once that it did. He was right, and it solved the prob-lem. She probably hadn’t wanted Bobby in her bed (let alone “Brat-tigan”), and she really hadn’t wanted Bobby up here in this hot third-floor room—that he was sure of. He figured she’d been looking so hard for a solution that she’d looked right past the obvious one.

So it was decided that Ted would spend Tuesday and Wednesday nights of the following week on the pull-out couch in the Garfields’ living room. Bobby was excited by the prospect: he would have two days on his own—three, counting Thursday—and there would be someone with him at night, when things could get spooky. Not a babysitter, either, but a grownup friend. It wasn’t the same as Sully-John going to Camp Winnie for a week, but in a way it was. Camp Broad Street, Bobby thought, and almost laughed out loud.

“We’ll have fun,” Ted said. “I’ll make my famous beans-and-franks casserole.” He reached over and ruffled Bobby’s crewcut.

“If you’re going to have beans and franks, it might be wise to bring that down,” his mom said, and pointed the fingers holding her cigarette at Ted’s fan.

Ted and Bobby laughed. Liz Garfield smiled her cynical half-smile, finished her cigarette, and put it out in Ted’s ashtray. When she did, Bobby again noticed the puffiness of her eyelids.

As Bobby and his mother went back down the stairs, Bobby remembered the poster he had seen in the park—the missing Corgi who would bring you a BALL if you said HURRY UP PHIL. He should tell Ted about the poster. He should tell Ted about everything. But if he did that and Ted left 149, who would stay with him next week? What would happen to Camp Broad Street, two fellows eating Ted’s famous beans-and-franks casserole for supper (maybe in front of the TV, which his mom rarely allowed) and then staying up as late as they wanted?

Bobby made a promise to himself: he would tell Ted everything next Friday, after his mother was back from her conference or semi-nar or whatever it was. He would make a complete report and Ted could do whatever he needed to do. He might even stick around.

With this decision Bobby’s mind cleared amazingly, and when he saw an upside-down FOR SALE card on the Total Grocery bulletin board two days later—it was for a washer-dryer set—he was able to put it out of his thoughts almost immediately.

That was nevertheless an uneasy week for Bobby Garfield, very uneasy indeed. He saw two more lost-pet posters, one downtown and one out on Asher Avenue, half a mile beyond the Asher Empire (the block he lived on was no longer enough; he found himself going far-ther and farther afield in his daily scouting trips). And Ted began to have those weird blank periods with greater frequency. They lasted longer when they came, too. Sometimes he spoke when he was in that distant state of mind, and not always in English. When he did speak in English, what he said did not always make sense. Most of the time Bobby thought Ted was one of the sanest, smartest, neatest guys he had ever met. When he went away, though, it was scary. At least his mom didn’t know. Bobby didn’t think she’d be too cool on the idea of leaving him with a guy who sometimes flipped out and started talk-ing nonsense in English or gibberish in some other language.

After one of these lapses, when Ted did nothing for almost a minute and a half but stare blankly off into space, making no response to Bobby’s increasingly agitated questions, it occurred to Bobby that perhaps Ted wasn’t in his own head at all but in some other world—that he had left Earth as surely as those people in Ring Around the Sun who discovered they could follow the spirals on a child’s top to just about anywhere.

Ted had been holding a Chesterfield between his fingers when he went blank; the ash grew long and eventually dropped off onto the table. When the coal grew unnervingly close to Ted’s bunchy knuck-les, Bobby pulled it gently free and was putting it out in the over-flowing ashtray when Ted finally came back.

“Smoking?” he asked with a frown. “Hell, Bobby, you’re too young to smoke.”

“I was just putting it out for you. I thought . . .” Bobby shrugged, suddenly shy.

Ted looked at the first two fingers of his right hand, where there was a permanent yellow nicotine stain. He laughed—a short bark with absolutely no humor in it. “Thought I was going to burn myself, did you?”

Bobby nodded. “What do you think about when you go off like that? Where do you go?”

“That’s hard to explain,” Ted replied, and then asked Bobby to read him his horoscope.

Thinking about Ted’s trances was distracting. Not talking about the things Ted was paying him to look for was even more distracting. As a result, Bobby—ordinarily a pretty good hitter—struck out four times in an afternoon game for the Wolves at Sterling House. He also lost four straight Battleship games to Sully at S-J’s house on Friday, when it rained.

“What the heck’s wrong with you?” Sully asked. “That’s the third time you called out squares you already called out before. Also, I have to practically holler in your ear before you answer me. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” That was what he said. Everything. That was what he felt.

Carol also asked Bobby a couple of times that week if he was okay; Mrs. Gerber asked if he was “off his feed”; Yvonne Loving wanted to know if he had mono, and then giggled until she seemed in danger of exploding.

The only person who didn’t notice Bobby’s odd behavior was his mom. Liz Garfield was increasingly preoccupied with her trip to Providence, talking on the phone in the evenings with Mr. Biderman or one of the other two who were going (Bill Cushman was one of them; Bobby couldn’t exactly remember the name of the other guy), laying clothes out on her bed until the spread was almost covered, then shaking her head over them angrily and returning them to the closet, making an appointment to get her hair done and then calling the lady back and asking if she could add a manicure. Bobby wasn’t even sure what a manicure was. He had to ask Ted.

She seemed excited by her preparations, but there was also a kind of grimness to her. She was like a soldier about to storm an enemy beach, or a paratrooper who would soon be jumping out of a plane and landing behind enemy lines. One of her evening telephone con-versations seemed to be a whispered argument—Bobby had an idea it was with Mr. Biderman, but he wasn’t sure. On Saturday, Bobby came into her bedroom and saw her looking at two new dresses— dressy dresses, one with thin little shoulder straps and one with no straps at all, just a top like a bathing suit. The boxes they had come in lay tumbled on the floor with tissue paper foaming out of them. His mom was standing over the dresses, looking down at them with an expression Bobby had never seen before: big eyes, drawn-together brows, taut white cheeks which flared with spots of rouge. One hand was at her mouth, and he could hear bonelike clittering sounds as she bit at her nails. A Kool smoldered in an ashtray on the bureau, appar-ently forgotten. Her big eyes shuttled back and forth between the two dresses.

“Mom?” Bobby asked, and she jumped—literally jumped into the air. Then she whirled on him, her mouth drawn down in a grimace.

“Jesus Christ!” she almost snarled. “Do you knock?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and began to back out of the room. His mother had never said anything about knocking before. “Mom, are you all right?”

“Fine!” She spied the cigarette, grabbed it, smoked furiously. She exhaled with such force that Bobby almost expected to see smoke come from her ears as well as her nose and mouth. “I’d be finer if I could find a cocktail dress that didn’t make me look like Elsie the Cow. Once I was a size six, do you know that? Before I married your father I was a size six. Now look at me! Elsie the Cow! Moby-damn-Dick!”

“Mom, you’re not big. In fact just lately you look—”

“Get out, Bobby. Please let Mother alone. I have a headache.”

That night he heard her crying again. The following day he saw her carefully packing one of the dresses into her luggage—the one with the thin straps. The other went back into its store-box: GOWNS BY LUCIE OF BRIDGEPORT was written across the front in elegant maroon script.

On Monday night, Liz invited Ted Brautigan down to have dinner with them. Bobby loved his mother’s meatloaf and usually asked for seconds, but on this occasion he had to work hard to stuff down a sin-gle piece. He was terrified that Ted would trance out and his mother would pitch a fit over it.

His fear proved groundless. Ted spoke pleasantly of his childhood in New Jersey and, when Bobby’s mom asked him, of his job in Hart-ford. To Bobby he seemed less comfortable talking about accounting than he did reminiscing about sleighing as a kid, but his mom didn’t appear to notice. Ted did ask for a second slice of meatloaf.

When the meal was over and the table cleared, Liz gave Ted a list of telephone numbers, including those of Dr. Gordon, the Sterling House Summer Rec office, and the Warwick Hotel. “If there are any problems, I want to hear from you. Okay?”

Ted nodded. “Okay.”

“Bobby? No big worries?” She put her hand briefly on his fore-head, the way she used to do when he complained of feeling feverish.

“Nope. We’ll have a blast. Won’t we, Mr. Brautigan?”

“Oh, call him Ted,” Liz almost snapped. “If he’s going to be sleep-ing in our living room, I guess I better call him Ted, too. May I?”

“Indeed you may. Let it be Ted from this moment on.”

He smiled. Bobby thought it was a sweet smile, open and friendly. He didn’t understand how anyone could resist it. But his mother could and did. Even now, while she was returning Ted’s smile, he saw the hand with the Kleenex in it tightening and loosening in its old familiar gesture of anxious displeasure. One of her absolute favorite sayings now came to Bobby’s mind: I’d trust him (or her) as far as I could sling a piano.

“And from now on I’m Liz.” She held out a hand across the table and they shook like people meeting for the first time . . . except Bobby knew his mother’s mind was already made up on the subject of Ted Brautigan. If her back hadn’t been against the wall, she never would have trusted Bobby with him. Not in a million years.

She opened her purse and took out a plain white envelope. “There’s ten dollars in here,” she said, handing the envelope to Ted. “You boys will want to eat out at least one night, I expect—Bobby likes the Colony Diner, if that’s all right with you—and you may want to take in a movie, as well. I don’t know what else there might be, but it’s best to have a little cushion, don’t you think?”

“Always better safe than sorry,” Ted agreed, tucking the envelope carefully into the front pocket of his slacks, “but I don’t expect we’ll go through anything like ten dollars in three days. Will we, Bobby?”

“Gee, no, I don’t see how we could.”

“Waste not, want not,” Liz said—it was another of her favorites, right up there with the fool and his money soon parted. She plucked a cigarette out of the pack on the table beside the sofa and lit it with a hand which was not quite steady. “You boys will be fine. Probably have a better time than I will.”

Looking at her ragged, bitten fingernails, Bobby thought, That’s for sure.

His mom and the others were going to Providence in Mr. Biderman’s car, and the next morning at seven o’clock Liz and Bobby Garfield stood on the porch, waiting for it to show up. The air had that early hazy hush that meant the hot days of summer had arrived. From Asher Avenue came the hoot and rumble of heavy going-to-work traffic, but down here on Broad there was only the occasional passing car or delivery truck. Bobby could hear the hisha-hisha of lawn-sprinklers, and, from the other side of the block, the endless roop-roop-roop of Bowser. Bowser sounded the same whether it was June or January; to Bobby Garfield, Bowser seemed as changeless as God.

“You don’t have to wait out here with me, you know,” Liz said. She was wearing a light coat and smoking a cigarette. She had on a little more makeup than usual, but Bobby thought he could still detect shadows under her eyes—she had passed another restless night.

“I don’t mind.”

“I hope it’s all right, leaving you with him.”

“I wish you wouldn’t worry. Ted’s a good guy, Mom.”

She made a little hmphing noise.

There was a twinkle of chrome from the bottom of the hill as Mr. Biderman’s Mercury (not vulgar, exactly, but a boat of a car all the same) turned onto their street from Commonwealth and came up the hill toward 149.

“There he is, there he is,” his mom said, sounding nervous and excited. She bent down. “Give me a little smooch, Bobby. I don’t want to kiss you and smear my lipstick.”

Bobby put his hand on her arm and lightly kissed her cheek. He smelled her hair, the perfume she was wearing, her face-powder. He would never kiss her with that same unshadowed love again.

She gave him a vague little smile, not looking at him, looking instead at Mr. Biderman’s boat of a Merc, which swerved gracefully across the street and pulled up at the curb in front of the house. She reached for her two suitcases (two seemed a lot for two days, Bobby thought, although he supposed the fancy dress took up a good deal of space in one of them), but he already had them by the handles.

“Those are too heavy, Bobby—you’ll trip on the steps.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.”

She gave him a distracted look, then waved to Mr. Biderman and went toward the car, high heels clacking. Bobby followed, trying not to grimace at the weight of the suitcases . . . what had she put in them, clothes or bricks?

He got them down to the sidewalk without having to stop and rest, at least. Mr. Biderman was out of the car by then, first putting a casual kiss on his mother’s cheek, then shaking out the key that opened the trunk.

“Howya doin, Sport, howza boy?” Mr. Biderman always called Bobby Sport. “Lug em around back and I’ll slide em in. Women always hafta bring the farm, don’t they? Well, you know the old say-ing—can’t live with em, can’t shoot em outside the state of Mon-tana.” He bared his teeth in a grin that made Bobby think of Jack in Lord of the Flies. “Want me to take one?”

“I’ve got em,” Bobby said. He trudged grimly in Mr. Biderman’s wake, shoulders aching, the back of his neck hot and starting to sweat.

Mr. Biderman opened the trunk, plucked the suitcases from Bobby’s hands, and slid them in with the rest of the luggage. Behind them, his mom was looking in the back window and talking with the other two men who were going. She laughed at something one of them said. To Bobby the laugh sounded about as real as a wooden leg.

Mr. Biderman closed the trunk and looked down at Bobby. He was a narrow man with a wide face. His cheeks were always flushed.

You could see his pink scalp in the tracks left by the teeth of his comb. He wore little round glasses with gold rims. To Bobby his smile looked as real as his mother’s laugh had sounded.

“Gonna play some baseball this summer, Sport?” Don Biderman bent his knees a little and cocked an imaginary bat. Bobby thought he looked like a dope.

“Yes, sir. I’m on the Wolves at Sterling House. I was hoping to make the Lions, but . . .”

“Good. Good.” Mr. Biderman made a big deal of looking at his watch—the wide gold Twist-O-Flex band was dazzling in the early sunshine—and then patted Bobby’s cheek. Bobby had to make a conscious effort not to cringe from his touch. “Say, we gotta get this wagon-train rolling! Shake her easy, Sport. Thanks for the loan of your mother.”

He turned away and escorted Liz around the Mercury to the pas-senger side. He did this with a hand pressed to her back. Bobby liked that even less than watching the guy smooch her cheek. He glanced at the well-padded, business-suited men in the rear seat—Dean was the other guy’s name, he remembered—just in time to see them elbowing each other. Both were grinning.

Something’s wrong here, Bobby thought, and as Mr. Biderman opened the passenger door for his mother, as she murmured her thanks and slid in, gathering her dress a little so it wouldn’t wrinkle, he had an urge to tell her not to go, Rhode Island was too far away, Bridgeport would be too far away, she needed to stay home.

He said nothing, though, only stood on the curb as Mr. Biderman closed her door and walked back around to the driver’s side. He opened that door, paused, and then did his stupid little batter-up pantomime again. This time he added an asinine fanny-wiggle. What a nimrod, Bobby thought.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Sport,” he said.

“But if you do, name it after me,” Cushman called from the back seat. Bobby didn’t know exactly what that meant but it must have been funny because Dean laughed and Mr. Biderman tipped him one of those just-between-us-guys winks.

His mother was leaning in his direction. “You be a good boy, Bobby,” she said. “I’ll be back around eight on Thursday night—no later than ten. You’re sure you’re fine with that?”

No, I’m not fine with it at all. Don’t go off with them, Mom, don’t go off with Mr. Biderman and those two grinning dopes sitting behind you. Those two nimrods. Please don’t.

“Sure he is,” Mr. Biderman said. “He’s a sport. Ain’t you, Sport?”

“Bobby?” she asked, not looking at Mr. Biderman. “Are you all set?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m a sport.”

Mr. Biderman bellowed ferocious laughter—Kill the pig, cut his throat, Bobby thought—and dropped the Mercury into gear. “Prov-idence or bust!” he cried, and the car rolled away from the curb, swerving across to the other side of Broad Street and heading up toward Asher. Bobby stood on the sidewalk, waving as the Merc passed Carol’s house and Sully-John’s. He felt as if he had a bone in his heart. If this was some sort of premonition—a winkle—he never wanted to have another one.

A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked around and saw Ted stand-ing there in his bathrobe and slippers, smoking a cigarette. His hair, which had yet to make its morning acquaintance with the brush, stood up around his ears in comical sprays of white.

“So that was the boss,” he said. “Mr. . . . Bidermeyer, is it?”

“Biderman.”

“And how do you like him, Bobby?”

Speaking with a low, bitter clarity, Bobby said, “I trust him about as far as I could sling a piano.”

VI. A DIRTY OLD MAN. TED’S CASSEROLE. A BAD DREAM.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.

DOWN THERE.

An hour or so after seeing his mother off, Bobby went down to FieldB behind Sterling House. There were no real games until afternoon, nothing but three-flies-six-grounders or rolly-bat, but even rolly-bat was better than nothing. On Field A, to the north, the little kids were futzing away at a game that vaguely resembled baseball; on Field C, to the south, some high-school kids were playing what was almost the real thing.

Shortly after the town square clock had bonged noon and the boys broke to go in search of the hotdog wagon, Bill Pratt asked, “Who’s that weird guy over there?”

He was pointing to a bench in the shade, and although Ted was wearing a trenchcoat, an old fedora hat, and dark glasses, Bobby rec-ognized him at once. He guessed S-J would’ve, too, if S-J hadn’t been at Camp Winnie. Bobby almost raised one hand in a wave, then didn’t, because Ted was in disguise. Still, he’d come out to watch his downstairs friend play ball. Even though it wasn’t a real game, Bobby felt an absurdly large lump rise in his throat. His mom had only come to watch him once in the two years he’d been playing— last August, when his team had been in the Tri-Town Champi-onships—and even then she’d left in the fourth inning, before Bobby connected for what proved to be the game-winning triple. Somebody has to work around here, Bobby-O, she would have replied had he dared reproach her for that. Your father didn’t exactly leave us well off, you know. It was true, of course—she had to work and Ted was retired. Except Ted had to stay clear of the low men in the yellow coats, and that was a full-time job. The fact that they didn’t exist wasn’t the point. Ted believed they did . . . but had come out to see him play just the same.

“Probably some dirty old man wanting to put a suckjob on one of the little kids,” Harry Shaw said. Harry was small and tough, a boy going through life with his chin stuck out a mile. Being with Bill and Harry suddenly made Bobby homesick for Sully-John, who had left on the Camp Winnie bus Monday morning (at the brain-numbing hour of five A.M.). S-J didn’t have much of a temper and he was kind. Sometimes Bobby thought that was the best thing about Sully—he was kind.

From Field C there came the hefty crack of a bat—an authoritative full-contact sound which none of the Field B boys could yet pro-duce. It was followed by savage roars of approval that made Bill, Harry, and Bobby look a little nervously in that direction.

“St. Gabe’s boys,” Bill said. “They think they own Field C.”

“Cruddy Catlicks,” Harry said. “Catlicks are sissies—I could take any one of them.”

“How about fifteen or twenty?” Bill asked, and Harry was silent. Up ahead, glittering like a mirror, was the hotdog wagon. Bobby touched the buck in his pocket. Ted had given it to him out of the envelope his mother had left, then had put the envelope itself behind the toaster, telling Bobby to take what he needed when he needed it. Bobby was almost exalted by this level of trust.

“Look on the bright side,” Bill said. “Maybe those St. Gabe’s boys will beat up the dirty old man.”

When they got to the wagon, Bobby bought only one hotdog instead of the two he had been planning on. His appetite seemed to have shrunk. When they got back to Field B, where the Wolves’ coaches had now appeared with the equipment cart, the bench Ted had been sitting on was empty.

“Come on, come on!” Coach Terrell called, clapping his hands. “Who wants to play some baseball here?”

That night Ted cooked his famous casserole in the Garfields’ oven. It meant more hotdogs, but in the summer of 1960 Bobby Garfield could have eaten hotdogs three times a day and had another at bedtime.

He read stuff to Ted out of the newspaper while Ted put their din-ner together. Ted only wanted to hear a couple of paragraphs about the impending Patterson–Johansson rematch, the one everybody was calling the fight of the century, but he wanted to hear every word of the article about tomorrow night’s Albini–Haywood tilt at The Garden in New York. Bobby thought this moderately weird, but he was too happy to even comment on it, let alone complain.

He couldn’t remember ever having spent an evening without his mother, and he missed her, yet he was also relieved to have her gone for a little while. There had been a queer sort of tension running through the apartment for weeks now, maybe even for months. It was like an electrical hum so constant that you got used to it and didn’t realize how much a part of your life it had become until it was gone. That thought brought another of his mother’s sayings to mind.

“What are you thinking?” Ted asked as Bobby came over to get the plates.

“That a change is as good as a rest,” Bobby replied. “It’s some-thing my mom says. I hope she’s having as good a time as I am.”

“So do I, Bobby,” Ted said. He bent, opened the oven, checked their dinner. “So do I.”

The casserole was terrific, with canned B&M beans—the only kind Bobby really liked—and exotic spicy hotdogs not from the supermarket but from the butcher just off the town square. (Bobby assumed Ted had bought these while wearing his “disguise.”) All this came in a horse-radish sauce that zinged in your mouth and then made you feel sort of sweaty in the face. Ted had two helpings; Bobby had three, washing them down with glass after glass of grape Kool-Aid.

Ted blanked out once during the meal, first saying that he could feel them in the backs of his eyeballs, then lapsing either into some foreign language or outright gibberish, but the incident was brief and didn’t cut into Bobby’s appetite in the slightest. The blank-outs were part of Ted, that was all, like his scuffling walk and the nicotine stains between the first two fingers of his right hand.

They cleaned up together, Ted stowing the leftover casserole in the fridge and washing the dishes, Bobby drying and putting things away because he knew where everything went.

“Interested in taking a ride to Bridgeport with me tomorrow?” Ted asked as they worked. “We could go to the movies—the early matinee—and then I have to do an errand.”

“Gosh, yeah!” Bobby said. “What do you want to see?”

“I’m open to suggestions, but I was thinking perhaps Village of the Damned, a British film. It’s based on a very fine science-fiction novel by John Wyndham. Would that suit?”

At first Bobby was so excited he couldn’t speak. He had seen the ads for Village of the Damned in the newspaper—all those spooky-look-ing kids with the glowing eyes—but hadn’t thought he would ever actually get to see it. It sure wasn’t the sort of Saturday-matinee movie that would ever play at Harwich on the Square or the Asher Empire. Matinees in those theaters consisted mostly of big-bug mon-ster shows, westerns, or Audie Murphy war movies. And although his mother usually took him if she went to an evening show, she didn’t like science fiction (Liz liked moody love stories like The Dark at the Top of the Stairs). Also the theaters in Bridgeport weren’t like the antiquey old Harwich or the somehow businesslike Empire, with its plain, undecorated marquee. The theaters in Bridgeport were like fairy cas-tles—they had huge screens (swag upon swag of velvety curtains covered them between shows), ceilings where tiny lights twinkled in galactic profusion, brilliant electric wall-sconces . . . and two balconies.

“Bobby?”

“You bet!” he said at last, thinking he probably wouldn’t sleep tonight. “I’d love it. But aren’t you afraid of . . . you know . . .”

“We’ll take a taxi instead of the bus. I can phone for another taxi to take us back home later. We’ll be fine. I think they’re moving away now, anyway. I don’t sense them so clearly.”

Yet Ted glanced away when he said this, and to Bobby he looked like a man trying to tell himself a story he can’t quite believe. If the increasing frequency of his blank-outs meant anything, Bobby thought, he had good reason to look that way.

Stop it, the low men don’t exist, they’re no more real than Flash Gordon and Dale Arden. The things he asked you to look for are just . . . just things. Remember that, Bobby-O: just ordinary things.

With dinner cleared away, the two of them sat down to watch Bronco, with Ty Hardin. Not among the best of the so-called “adult westerns” (Cheyenne and Maverick were the best), but not bad, either. Halfway through the show, Bobby let out a moderately loud fart. Ted’s casserole had begun its work. He snuck a sideways glance to make sure Ted wasn’t holding his nose and grimacing. Nope, just watching the television, seemingly absorbed.

When a commercial came on (some actress selling refrigerators), Ted asked if Bobby would like a glass of rootbeer. Bobby said okay. “I thought I might help myself to one of the Alka-Seltzers I saw in the bathroom, Bobby. I may have eaten a bit too much.”

As he got up, Ted let out a long, sonorous fart that sounded like a trombone. Bobby put his hands to his mouth and giggled. Ted gave him a rueful smile and left the room. Bobby’s giggling forced out more farts, a little tooting stream of them, and when Ted came back with a fizzy glass of Alka-Seltzer in one hand and a foamy glass of Hires rootbeer in the other, Bobby was laughing so hard that tears streamed down his cheeks and hung off his jawline like raindrops.

“This should help fix us up,” Ted said, and when he bent to hand Bobby his rootbeer, a loud honk came from behind him. “Goose just flew out of my ass,” he added matter-of-factly, and Bobby laughed so hard that he could no longer sit in his chair. He slithered out of it and lay in a boneless heap on the floor.

“I’ll be right back,” Ted told him. “T here’s something else we need.”

He left open the door between the apartment and the foyer, so Bobby could hear him going up the stairs. By the time Ted got to the third floor, Bobby had managed to crawl into his chair again. He didn’t think he’d ever laughed so hard in his life. He drank some of his rootbeer, then farted again. “Goose just flew . . . flew out . . .” But he couldn’t finish. He flopped back in his chair and howled, shaking his head from side to side.

The stairs creaked as Ted came back down. When he reentered the apartment he had his fan, with the electric cord looped neatly around the base, under one arm. “Your mother was right about this,” he said. When he bent to plug it in, another goose flew out of his ass.

“She usually is,” Bobby said, and that struck them both funny. They sat in the living room with the fan rotating back and forth, stir-ring the increasingly fragrant air. Bobby thought if he didn’t stop laughing soon his head would pop.

When Bronco was over (by then Bobby had lost all track of the story), he helped Ted pull out the couch. T he bed which had been hiding inside it didn’t look all that great, but Liz had made it up with some spare sheets and blankets and Ted said it would be fine. Bobby brushed his teeth, then looked out from the door of his bedroom at Ted, who was sitting on the end of the sofa-bed and watching the news.

“Goodnight,” Bobby said.

Ted looked over to him, and for a moment Bobby thought Ted would get up, cross the room, give him a hug and maybe a kiss. Instead of that, he sketched a funny, awkward little salute. “Sleep well, Bobby.”

“Thanks.”

Bobby closed his bedroom door, turned off the light, got into bed, and spread his heels to the corners of the mattress. As he looked up into the dark he remembered the morning Ted had taken hold of his shoulders, then laced his bunchy old hands together behind his neck. Their faces that day had been almost as close as his and Carol’s had been on the Ferris wheel just before they kissed. The day he had argued with his mother. The day he had known about the money taped in the catalogue. Also the day he had won ninety cents from Mr. McQuown. Go buy yourself a martini, Mr. McQuown had said.

Had it come from Ted? Had the winkle come from Ted touching him?

“Yeah,” Bobby whispered in the dark. “Yeah, I think it probably did.”

What if he touches me again that way?

Bobby was still considering this idea when he fell asleep.

He dreamed that people were chasing his mother through the jun-gle—Jack and Piggy, the littluns, and Don Biderman, Cushman, and Dean. His mother was wearing her new dress from Gowns by Lucie, the black one with the thin straps, only it had been torn in places by thorns and branches. Her stockings were in tatters. They looked like strips of dead skin hanging off her legs. Her eyes were deep sweatholes gleaming with terror. The boys chasing her were naked. Biderman and the other two were wearing their business suits. All of them had alternating streaks of red and white paint on their faces; all were brandishing spears and shouting Kill the pig, slit her throat! Kill the pig, drink her blood! Kill the pig, strew her guts!

He woke in the gray light of dawn, shivering, and got up to use the bathroom. By the time he went back to bed he could no longer remember precisely what he had dreamed. He slept for another two hours, and woke up to the good smells of bacon and eggs. Bright summer sunshine was slanting in his bedroom window and Ted was making breakfast.

Village of the Damned was the last and greatest movie of Bobby Garfield’s childhood; it was the first and greatest movie of what came after childhood—a dark period when he was often bad and always confused, a Bobby Garfield he felt he didn’t really know. The cop who arrested him for the first time had blond hair, and what came to Bobby’s mind as the cop led him away from the mom ’n pop store Bobby had broken into (by then he and his mother were living in a suburb north of Boston) were all those blond kids in Village of the Damned. The cop could have been one of them all grown up.

The movie was playing at the Criterion, the very avatar of those Bridgeport dream-palaces Bobby had been thinking about the night before. It was in black and white, but the contrasts were sharp, not all fuzzy like on the Zenith back in the apartment, and the images were enormous. So were the sounds, especially the shivery theremin music that played when the Midwich children really started to use their power.

Bobby was enthralled by the story, understanding even before the first five minutes were over that it was a real story, the way Lord of the Flies had been a real story. The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier. He guessed that Sully-John would have been bored with it, except for the ending. S-J liked to see giant scorpions crushing Mexico City or Rodan stomping Tokyo; beyond that his interest in what he called “creature features” was limited. But Sully wasn’t here, and for the first time since he’d left, Bobby was glad.

They were in time for the one o’clock matinee, and the theater was almost deserted. Ted (wearing his fedora and with his dark glasses folded into the breast pocket of his shirt) bought a big bag of pop-corn, a box of Dots, a Coke for Bobby, and a rootbeer (of course!) for himself. Every now and then he would pass Bobby the popcorn or the candy and Bobby would take some, but he was hardly aware that he was eating, let alone of what he was eating.

The movie began with everyone in the British village of Midwich falling asleep (a man who was driving a tractor at the time of the event was killed; so was a woman who fell face-first onto a lighted stove burner). The military was notified, and they sent a reconnais-sance plane to take a look. The pilot fell asleep as soon as he was over Midwich airspace; the plane crashed. A soldier with a rope around his middle walked ten or twelve paces into the village, then swooned into a deep sleep. When he was dragged back, he awakened as soon as he was hauled over the “sleep-line” that had been painted across the highway.

Everyone in Midwich woke up eventually, and everything seemed to be all right . . . until, a few weeks later, the women in town dis-covered they were pregnant. Old women, young women, even girls Carol Gerber’s age, all pregnant, and the children they gave birth to were those spooky kids from the poster, the ones with the blond hair and the glowing eyes.

Although the movie never said, Bobby figured the Children of the Damned must have been caused by some sort of outer-space phe-nomenon, like the pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In any case, they grew up faster than normal kids, they were super-smart, they could make people do what they wanted . . . and they were ruthless. When one father tried to discipline his particular Child of the Damned, all the kids clubbed together and directed their thoughts at the offending grownup (their eyes glowing, that theremin music so pulsing and strange that Bobby’s arms broke out in goosebumps as he drank his Coke) until the guy put a shotgun to his head and killed himself (that part wasn’t shown, and Bobby was glad).

The hero was George Sanders. His wife gave birth to one of the blond children. S-J would have scoffed at George, called him a “queer bastard” or a “golden oldie,” but Bobby found him a welcome change from heroes like Randolph Scott, Richard Carlson, and the inevitable Audie Murphy. George was really sort of ripshit, in a weird English way. In the words of Denny Rivers, old George knew how to lay chilly. He wore special cool ties and combed his hair back tight to his skull. He didn’t look as though he could beat up a bunch of saloon baddies or anything, but he was the only guy from Midwich the Children of the Damned would have anything to do with; in fact they drafted him to be their teacher. Bobby couldn’t imagine Ran-dolph Scott or Audie Murphy teaching a bunch of super-smart kids from outer space anything.

In the end, George Sanders was also the one who got rid of them. He had discovered he could keep the Children from reading his mind—for a little while, anyway—if he imagined a brick wall in his head, with all his most secret thoughts behind it. And after everyone had decided the Children must go (you could teach them math, but not why it was bad to punish someone by making him drive over a cliff), Sanders put a time-bomb into his briefcase and took it into the schoolroom. That was the only place where the Children—Bobby understood in some vague way that they were only supernatural ver-sions of Jack Merridew and his hunters in Lord of the Flies—were all together.

They sensed that Sanders was hiding something from them. In the movie’s final excruciating sequence, you could see bricks flying out of the wall Sanders had constructed in his head, flying faster and faster as the Children of the Damned pried into him, trying to find out what he was concealing. At last they uncovered the image of the bomb in the briefcase—eight or nine sticks of dynamite wired up to an alarm clock. You saw their creepy golden eyes widen with under-standing, but they didn’t have time to do anything. The bomb exploded. Bobby was shocked that the hero died—Randolph Scott never died in the Saturday-matinee movies at the Empire, neither did Audie Murphy or Richard Carlson—but he understood that George Sanders had given his life For the Greater Good of All. He thought he understood something else, as well: Ted’s blank-outs.

While Ted and Bobby had been visiting Midwich, the day in southern Connecticut had turned hot and glaring. Bobby didn’t like the world much after a really good movie in any case; for a little while it felt like an unfair joke, full of people with dull eyes, small plans, and facial blemishes. He sometimes thought if the world had a plot it would be so much better.

“Brautigan and Garfield hit the bricks!” Ted exclaimed as they stepped from beneath the marquee (a banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE hung from the marquee’s front). “What did you think? Did you enjoy it?”

“It was great,” Bobby said. “Fantabulous. Thanks for taking me. It was practically the best movie I ever saw. How about when he had the dynamite? Did you think he’d be able to fool them?”

“Well . . . I’d read the book, remember. Will you read it, do you think?”

“Yes!” Bobby felt, in fact, a sudden urge to bolt back to Harwich, running the whole distance down the Connecticut Pike and Asher Avenue in the hot sunshine so he could borrow The Midwich Cuck-oos with his new adult library card at once. “Did he write any other science-fiction stories?”

“John Wyndham? Oh yes, quite a few. And will no doubt write more. One nice thing about science-fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely dither five years between books. That is the preroga-tive of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.”

“Are the others as good as the one we just saw?”

“The Day of the Triffids is as good. The Kraken Wakes is even better.”

“What’s a kraken?”

They had reached a streetcorner and were waiting for the light to change. Ted made a spooky, big-eyed face and bent down toward Bobby with his hands on his knees. “It’s a monstah,” he said, doing a pretty good Boris Karloff imitation.

They walked on, talking first about the movie and then about whether or not there really might be life in outer space, and then on to the special cool ties George Sanders had worn in the movie (Ted told him that kind of tie was called an ascot). When Bobby next took notice of their surroundings they had come to a part of Bridgeport he had never been in before—when he came to the city with his mom, they stuck to downtown, where the big stores were. The stores here were small and crammed together. None sold what the big depart-ment stores did: clothes and appliances and shoes and toys. Bobby saw signs for locksmiths, check-cashing services, used books. ROD’S GUNS, read one sign. WO FATNOODLE CO., read another. FOTO FINISH-ING, read a third. Next to WO FAT was a shop selling SPECIAL SOU-VENIRS. There was something weirdly like the Savin Rock midway about this street, so much so that Bobby almost expected to see the Monte Man standing on a streetcorner with his makeshift table and his lobsterback playing cards.

Bobby tried to peer through the SPECIAL SOUVENIRS window when they passed, but it was covered by a big bamboo blind. He’d never heard of a store covering their show window during business hours. “Who’d want a special souvenir of Bridgeport, do you think?”

“Well, I don’t think they really sell souvenirs,” Ted said. “I’d guess they sell items of a sexual nature, few of them strictly legal.”

Bobby had questions about that—a billion or so—but felt it best to be quiet. Outside a pawnshop with three golden balls hanging over the door he paused to look at a dozen straight-razors which had been laid out on velvet with their blades partly open. They’d been arranged in a circle and the result was strange and (to Bobby) beautiful: look-ing at them was like looking at something removed from a deadly piece of machinery. The razors’ handles were much more exotic than the handle of the one Ted used, too. One looked like ivory, another like ruby etched with thin gold lines, a third like crystal.

“If you bought one of those you’d be shaving in style, wouldn’t you?” Bobby asked.

He thought Ted would smile, but he didn’t. “When people buy razors like that, they don’t shave with them, Bobby.”

“What do you mean?”

Ted wouldn’t tell him, but he did buy him a sandwich called a gyro in a Greek delicatessen. It came in a folded-over piece of home-made bread and was oozing a dubious white sauce which to Bobby looked quite a lot like pimple-pus. He forced himself to try it because Ted said they were good. It turned out to be the best sandwich he’d ever eaten, as meaty as a hotdog or a hamburger from the Colony Diner but with an exotic taste that no hamburger or hotdog had ever had. And it was great to be eating on the sidewalk, strolling along with his friend, looking and being looked at.

“What do they call this part of town?” Bobby asked. “Does it have a name?”

“These days, who knows?” Ted said, and shrugged. “They used to call it Greektown. Then the Italians came, the Puerto Ricans, and now the Negroes. There’s a novelist named David Goodis—the kind the college teachers never read, a genius of the drugstore paperback displays—who calls it ‘down there.’ He says every city has a neigh-borhood like this one, where you can buy sex or marijuana or a parrot that talks dirty, where the men sit talking on stoops like those men across the street, where the women always seem to be yelling for their kids to come in unless they want a whipping, and where the wine always comes in a paper sack.” Ted pointed into the gutter, where the neck of a Thunderbird bottle did indeed poke out of a brown bag. “It’s just down there, that’s what David Goodis says, the place where you don’t have any use for your last name and you can buy almost anything if you have cash in your pocket.”

Down there, Bobby thought, watching a trio of olive-skinned teenagers in gang jackets watch them as they passed. This is the land of straight-razors and special souvenirs.

The Criterion and Muncie’s Department Store had never seemed so far away. And Broad Street? That and all of Harwich could have been in another solar system.

At last they came to a place called The Corner Pocket, Pool and Bil-liards, Automatic Games, Rheingold on Tap. T here was also one of those banners reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE. As Bobby and Ted passed beneath it, a young man in a strappy tee-shirt and a chocolate-colored stingybrim like the kind Frank Sinatra wore came out the

VII. IN THE POCKET. THE SHIRT RIGHT OFF HIS BACK. OUTSIDE THE WILLIAM PENN. THE FRENCH SEX-KITTEN.

What struck Bobby first was the smell of beer. It was impacted, as if folks had been drinking in here since the days when the pyramids were still in the planning stages. Next was the sound of a TV, not turned to Bandstand but to one of the late-afternoon soap operas (“Oh John, oh Marsha” shows was what his mother called them), and the click of pool-balls. Only after these things had registered did his eyes chip in their own input, because they’d needed to adjust. The place was very dim.

And it was long, Bobby saw. To their right was an archway, and beyond it a room that appeared almost endless. Most of the pool-tables were covered, but a few stood in brilliant islands of light where men strolled languidly about, pausing every now and then to bend and shoot. Other men, hardly visible, sat in high seats along the wall, watching. One was getting his shoes shined. He looked about a thousand.

Straight ahead was a big room filled with Gottlieb pinball machines: a billion red and orange lights stuttered stomachache col-ors off a large sign which read IF YOU TILT THE SAME MACHINE TWICE YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE. A young man wearing another stingy-brim hat—apparently the approved headgear for the bad motorscoot-ers residing down there—was bent over Frontier Patrol, working the flippers frantically. A cigarette hung off his lower lip, the smoke rising past his face and the whorls of his combed-back hair. He was wearing a jacket tied around his waist and turned inside-out.

To the left of the lobby was a bar. It was from here that the sound of the TV and the smell of beer was coming. Three men sat there, each surrounded by empty stools, hunched over pilsner glasses. They didn’t look like the happy beer-drinkers you saw in the ads; to Bobby they looked the loneliest people on earth. He wondered why they didn’t at least huddle up and talk a little.

Closer by them was a desk. A fat man came rolling through the door behind it, and for a moment Bobby could hear the low sound of a radio playing. The fat man had a cigar in his mouth and was wearing a shirt covered with palm trees. He was snapping his fingers like the cool cat with the pool-cue case, and under his breath he was singing like this: “Choo-choo-chow, choo-choo-ka-chow-chow, choo-choo-chow-chow!” Bobby recognized the tune: “Tequila,” by T he Champs.

“Who you, buddy?” the fat man asked Ted. “I don’t know you. And he can’t be in here, anyway. Can’tcha read?” He jerked a fat thumb with a dirty nail at another sign, this one posted on the desk: B-21 OR B-GONE!

“You don’t know me, but I think you know Jimmy Girardi,” Ted said politely. “He told me you were the man to see . . . if you’re Len Files, that is.”

“I’m Len,” the man said. All at once he seemed considerably warmer. He held out a hand so white and pudgy that it looked like the gloves Mickey and Donald and Goofy wore in the cartoons. “You know Jimmy Gee, huh? Goddam Jimmy Gee! Why, his grampa’s back there getting a shine. He gets ’is boats shined a lot these days.” Len Files tipped Ted a wink. Ted smiled and shook the guy’s hand.

“That your kid?” Len Files asked, bending over his desk to get a closer look at Bobby. Bobby could smell Sen-Sen mints and cigars on his breath, sweat on his body. The collar of his shirt was speckled with dandruff.

“He’s a friend,” Ted said, and Bobby thought he might actually explode with happiness. “I didn’t want to leave him on the street.”

“Yeah, unless you’re willing to have to pay to get im back,” Len Files agreed. “You remind me of somebody, kid. Now why is that?”

Bobby shook his head, a little frightened to think he looked like anybody Len Files might know.

The fat man barely paid attention to Bobby’s head-shake. He had straightened and was looking at Ted again. “I can’t be having kids in here, Mr. . . . ?”

“Ted Brautigan.” He offered his hand. Len Files shook it.

“You know how it is, Ted. People in a business like mine, the cops keep tabs.”

“Of course. But he’ll stand right here—won’t you, Bobby?”

“Sure,” Bobby said.

“And our business won’t take long. But it’s a good little bit of busi-ness, Mr. Files—”

“Len.”

Len, of course, Bobby thought. Just Len. Because in here was down there.

“As I say, Len, this is a good piece of business I want to do. I think you’ll agree.”

“If you know Jimmy Gee, you know I don’t do the nickels and dimes,” Len said. “I leave the nickels and dimes to the niggers. What are we talking here? Patterson–Johansson?”

“Albini–Haywood. At The Garden tomorrow night?”

Len’s eyes widened. Then his fat and unshaven cheeks spread in a smile. “Man oh man oh Manischewitz. We need to explore this.”

“We certainly do.”

Len Files came out from around the desk, took Ted by the arm, and started to lead him toward the poolroom. Then he stopped and swung back. “Is it Bobby when you’re home and got your feet up, pal?”

“Yes, sir.” Yes sir, Bobby Garfield, he would have said anywhere else . . . but this was down there and he thought just plain Bobby would suffice.

“Well, Bobby, I know those pinball machines prolly look good to ya, and you prolly got a quarter or two in your pocket, but do what Adam dint and resist the temptation. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I won’t be long,” Ted told him, and then allowed Len Files to lead him through the arch and into the poolroom. They walked past the men in the high chairs, and Ted stopped to speak to the one getting his shoes shined. Next to Jimmy Gee’s grandfather, Ted Brautigan looked young. The old man peered up and Ted said something; the two men laughed into each other’s faces. Jimmy Gee’s grandfather had a good strong laugh for an old fellow. Ted reached out both hands and patted his sallow cheeks with gentle affection. That made Jimmy Gee’s grandfather laugh again. Then Ted let Len draw him into a curtained alcove past the other men in the other chairs.

Bobby stood by the desk as if rooted, but Len hadn’t said anything about not looking around, and so he did—in all directions. The walls were covered with beer signs and calendars that showed girls with most of their clothes off. One was climbing over a fence in the coun-try. Another was getting out of a Packard with most of her skirt in her lap and her garters showing. Behind the desk were more signs, most expressing some negative concept (IF YOU DON’TLIKE OUR TOWN LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE, DON’TSENDABOY TODOAMAN’SJOB, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH, NO CHECKS ACCEPTED, NO CREDIT, CRYING TOWELS ARE NOT PROVIDED BY THE MANAGEMENT) and a big red button marked POLICECALL.Suspended from the ceil-ing on a loop of dusty wire were cellophane packages, some marked GINSENG ORIENTAL LOVE ROOT and others SPANISH DELITE. Bobby wondered if they were vitamins of some kind. Why would they sell vitamins in a place like this?

The young guy in the roomful of automatic games whapped the side of Frontier Patrol, stepped back, gave the machine the finger. Then he strolled into the lobby area adjusting his hat. Bobby made his finger into a gun and pointed it at him. The young man looked surprised, then grinned and pointed back as he headed for the door. He loosened the tied arms of his jacket as he went.

“Can’t wear no club jacket in here,” he said, noting Bobby’s wide-eyed curiosity. “Can’t even show your fuckin colors. Rules of the house.”

“Oh.”

The young guy smiled and raised his hand. Traced in blue ink on the back was a devil’s pitchfork. “But I got the sign, little brother. See it?”

“Heck, yeah.” A tattoo. Bobby was faint with envy. The kid saw it; his smile widened into a grin full of white teeth.

“Fuckin Diablos, ’mano. Best club. Fuckin Diablos rule the streets. All others are pussy.”

“The streets down here.”

“Fuckin right down here, where else is there? Rock on, baby brother. I like you. You got a good look on you. Fuckin crewcut sucks, though.” The door opened, there was a gasp of hot air and streetlife noise, and the guy was gone.

A little wicker basket on the desk caught Bobby’s eye. He tilted it so he could see in. It was full of keyrings with plastic fobs—red and blue and green. Bobby picked one out so he could read the gold printing: THE CORNER POCKET BILLIARDS, POOL, AUTO. GAMES. KENMORE 8-2127.

“Go on, kid, take it.”

Bobby was so startled he almost knocked the basket of keyrings to the floor. The woman had come through the same door as Len Files, and she was even bigger—almost as big as the circus fat lady—but she was as light on her feet as a ballerina; Bobby looked up and she was just there, looming over him. She was Len’s sister, had to be.

“I’m sorry,” Bobby muttered, returning the keyring he’d picked up and pushing the basket back from the edge of the desk with little pats of his fingers. He might have succeeded in pushing it right over the far side if the fat woman hadn’t stopped it with one hand. She was smiling and didn’t look a bit mad, which to Bobby was a tremendous relief.

“Really, I’m not being sarcastic, you should take one.” She held out one of the keyrings. It had a green fob. “They’re just cheap little things, but they’re free. We give em away for the advertising. Like matches, you know, although I wouldn’t give a pack of matches to a kid. Don’t smoke, do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s making a good start. Stay away from the booze, too. Here. Take. Don’t turn down for free in this world, kid, there isn’t much of it going around.”

Bobby took the keyring with the green fob. “Thank you, ma’am. It’s neat.” He put the keyring in his pocket, knowing he would have to get rid of it—if his mother found such an item, she wouldn’t be happy. She’d have twenty questions, as Sully would say. Maybe even thirty.

“What’s your name?”

“Bobby.”

He waited to see if she would ask for his last name and was secretly delighted when she didn’t. “I’m Alanna.” She held out a hand crusted with rings. They twinkled like the pinball lights. “You here with your dad?”

“With my friend,” Bobby said. “I think he’s making a bet on the Haywood–Albini prizefight.”

Alanna looked alarmed and amused at the same time. She leaned forward with one finger to her red lips. She made a Shhh sound at Bobby, and blew out a strong liquory smell with it.

“Don’t say ‘bet’ in here,” she cautioned him. “This is a billiard par-lor. Always remember that and you’ll always be fine.”

“Okay.”

“You’re a handsome little devil, Bobby. And you look . . .” She paused. “Do I know your father, maybe? Is that possible?”

Bobby shook his head, but doubtfully—he had reminded Len of someone, too. “My dad’s dead. He died a long time ago.” He always added this so people wouldn’t get all gushy.

“What was his name?” But before he could say, Alanna Files said it herself—it came out of her painted mouth like a magic word. “Was it Randy? Randy Garrett, Randy Greer, something like that?”

For a moment Bobby was so flabbergasted he couldn’t speak. It felt as if all the breath had been sucked out of his lungs. “Randall Garfield. But how . . .”

She laughed, delighted. Her bosom heaved. “Well mostly your hair. But also the freckles . . . and this here ski-jump . . .” She bent forward and Bobby could see the tops of smooth white breasts that looked as big as waterbarrels. She skidded one finger lightly down his nose.

“He came in here to play pool?”

“Nah. Said he wasn’t much of a stick. He’d drink a beer. Also sometimes . . .” She made a quick gesture then—dealing from an invisible deck. It made Bobby think of McQuown.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “He never met an inside straight he didn’t like, that’s what I heard.”

“I don’t know about that, but he was a nice guy. He could come in here on a Monday night, when the place is always like a grave, and in half an hour or so he’d have everybody laughing. He’d play that song by Jo Stafford, I can’t remember the name, and make Lennie turn up the jukebox. A real sweetie, kid, that’s mostly why I remember him; a sweetie with red hair is a rare commodity. He wouldn’t buy a drunk a drink, he had a thing about that, but otherwise he’d give you the shirt right off his back. All you had to do was ask.”

“But he lost a lot of money, I guess,” Bobby said. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation—that he had met someone who had known his father. Yet he supposed a lot of finding out hap-pened like this, completely by accident. You were just going along, minding your own business, and all at once the past sideswiped you.

“Randy?” She looked surprised. “Nah. He’d come in for a drink maybe three times a week—you know, if he happened to be in the neighborhood. He was in real estate or insurance or selling or some one of those—”

“Real estate,” Bobby said. “It was real estate.”

“—and there was an office down here he’d visit. For the industrial properties, I guess, if it was real estate. You sure it wasn’t medical supplies?”

“No, real estate.”

“Funny how your memory works,” she said. “Some things stay clear, but mostly time goes by and green turns blue. All of the suit-n-tie businesses are gone down here now, anyway.” She shook her head sadly.

Bobby wasn’t interested in how the neighborhood had gone to blazes. “But when he did play, he lost. He was always trying to fill inside straights and stuff.”

“Did your mother tell you that?”

Bobby was silent.

Alanna shrugged. Interesting things happened all up and down her front when she did. “Well, that’s between you and her . . . and hey, maybe your dad threw his dough around in other places. All I know is that in here he’d just sit in once or twice a month with guys he knew, play until maybe midnight, then go home. If he left a big winner or a big loser, I’d probably remember. I don’t, so he probably broke even most nights he played. Which, by the way, makes him a pretty good poker-player. Better than most back there.” She rolled her eyes in the direction Ted and her brother had gone.

Bobby looked at her with growing confusion. Your father didn’t exactly leave us well off, his mother liked to say. There was the lapsed life insurance policy, the stack of unpaid bills; Little did I know, his mother had said just this spring, and Bobby was beginning to think that fit him, as well: Little did I know.

“He was such a good-looking guy, your dad,” Alanna said, “Bob Hope nose and all. I’d guess you got that to look forward to—you favor him. Got a girlfriend?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Were the unpaid bills a fiction? Was that possible? Had the life insurance policy actually been cashed and socked away, maybe in a bank account instead of between the pages of the Sears catalogue? It was a horrible thought, somehow. Bobby couldn’t imagine why his mother would want him to think his dad was

(a low man, a low man with red hair)

a bad guy if he really wasn’t, but there was something about the idea that felt . . . true. She could get mad, that was the thing about his mother. She could get so mad. And then she might say anything. It was possible that his father—who his mother had never once in Bobby’s memory called “Randy”—had given too many people too many shirts right off his back, and consequently made Liz Garfield mad. Liz Garfield didn’t give away shirts, not off her back or from anywhere else. You had to save your shirts in this world, because life wasn’t fair.

“What’s her name?”

“Liz.” He felt dazed, the way he’d felt coming out of the dark the-ater into the bright light.

“Like Liz Taylor.” Alanna looked pleased. “T hat’s a nice name for a girlfriend.”

Bobby laughed, a little embarrassed. “No, my mother’s Liz. My girlfriend’s name is Carol.”

“She pretty?”

“A real hotsy-totsy,” he said, grinning and wiggling one hand from side to side. He was delighted when Alanna roared with laughter. She reached over the desk, the flesh of her upper arm hanging like some fantastic wad of dough, and pinched his cheek. It hurt a little but he liked it.

“Cute kid! Can I tell you something?”

“Sure, what?”

“Just because a man likes to play a little cards, that doesn’t make him Attila the Hun. You know that, don’t you?”

Bobby nodded hesitantly, then more firmly.

“Your ma’s your ma, I don’t say nothing against anybody’s ma because I loved my own, but not everybody’s ma approves of cards or pool or . . . places like this. It’s a point of view, but that’s all it is. Get the picture?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. He did. He got the picture. He felt very strange, like laughing and crying at the same time. My dad was here, he thought. This seemed, at least for the time being, much more important than any lies his mother might have told about him. My dad was here, he might have stood right where I’m standing now. “I’m glad I look like him,” he blurted.

Alanna nodded, smiling. “You coming in here like that, just walk-ing in off the street. What are the odds?”

“I don’t know. But thanks for telling me about him. Thanks a lot.”

“He’d play that Jo Stafford song all night, if you’d let him,” Alanna said. “Now don’t you go wandering off.”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, Alanna.”

Bobby grinned. “Alanna.”

She blew him a kiss as his mother sometimes did, and laughed when Bobby pretended to catch it. Then she went back through the door. Bobby could see what looked like a living room beyond it. There was a big cross on one wall.

He reached into his pocket, hooked a finger through the keyring (it was, he thought, a special souvenir of his visit down there), and imagined himself riding down Broad Street on the Schwinn from the Western Auto. He was heading for the park. He was wearing a chocolate-colored stingybrim hat cocked back on his head. His hair was long and combed in a duck’s ass—no more crewcut, later for you, Jack. Tied around his waist was a jacket with his colors on it; riding the back of his hand was a blue tattoo, stamped deep and for-ever. Outside Field B Carol would be waiting for him. She’d be watching him ride up, she’d be thinking Oh you crazy boy as he swung the Schwinn around in a tight circle, spraying gravel toward (but not on) her white sneakers. Crazy, yes. A bad motorscooter and a mean go-getter.

Len Files and Ted were coming back now, both of them looking happy. Len, in fact, looked like the cat that ate the canary (as Bobby’s mother often said). Ted paused to pass another, briefer, word with the old guy, who nodded and smiled. When Ted and Len got back to the lobby area, Ted started toward the telephone booth just inside the door. Len took his arm and steered him toward the desk instead.

As Ted stepped behind it, Len ruffled Bobby’s hair. “I know who you look like,” he said. “It come to me while I was in the back room. Your dad was—”

“Garfield. Randy Garfield.” Bobby looked up at Len, who so resembled his sister, and thought how odd and sort of wonderful it was to be linked that way to your own blood kin. Linked so closely people who didn’t even know you could sometimes pick you out of a crowd. “Did you like him, Mr. Files?”

“Who, Randy? Sure, he was a helluva gizmo.” But Len Files seemed a little vague. He hadn’t noticed Bobby’s father in the same way his sister had, Bobby decided; Len probably wouldn’t remember about the Jo Stafford song or how Randy Garfield would give you the shirt right off his back. He wouldn’t give a drunk a drink, though; he wouldn’t do that. “Your pal’s all right, too,” Len went on, more enthusiastic now. “I like the high class and the high class likes me, but I don’t get real shooters like him in here often.” He turned to Ted, who was hunting nearsightedly through the phonebook. “Try Circle Taxi. KEnmore 6-7400.”

“Thanks,” Ted said.

“Don’t mention it.” Len brushed past Ted and went through the door behind the desk. Bobby caught another brief glimpse of the liv-ing room and the big cross. When the door shut, Ted looked over at Bobby and said: “You bet five hundred bucks on a prizefight and you don’t have to use the pay phone like the rest of the shmucks. Such a deal, huh?”

Bobby felt as if all the wind had been sucked out of him. “You bet five hundred dollars on Hurricane Haywood?”

Ted shook a Chesterfield out of his pack, put it in his mouth, lit it around a grin. “Good God, no,” he said. “On Albini.”

After he called the cab, Ted took Bobby over to the bar and ordered them both rootbeers. He doesn’t know I don’t really like rootbeer, Bobby thought. It seemed another piece in the puzzle, somehow—the puzzle of Ted. Len served them himself, saying nothing about how Bobby shouldn’t be sitting at the bar, he was a nice kid but just stink-ing the place up with his under-twenty-oneness; apparently a free phone call wasn’t all you got when you bet five hundred dollars on a prizefight. And not even the excitement of the bet could long distract Bobby from a certain dull certainty which stole much of his pleasure in hearing that his father hadn’t been such a bad guy, after all. The bet had been made to earn some runout money. Ted was leaving.

The taxi was a Checker with a huge back seat. The driver was deeply involved in the Yankees game on the radio, to the point where he sometimes talked back to the announcers.

“Files and his sister knew your father, didn’t they?” It wasn’t really a question.

“Yeah. Alanna especially. She thought he was a real nice guy.” Bobby paused. “But that’s not what my mother thinks.”

“I imagine your mother saw a side of him Alanna Files never did,” Ted replied. “More than one. People are like diamonds in that way, Bobby. They have many sides.”

“But Mom said . . .” It was too complicated. She’d never exactly said anything, really, only sort of suggested stuff. He didn’t know how to tell Ted that his mother had sides, too, and some of them made it hard to believe those things she never quite came out and said. And when you got right down to it, how much did he really want to know? His father was dead, after all. His mother wasn’t, and he had to live with her . . . and he had to love her. He had no one else to love, not even Ted. Because—

“When you going?” Bobby asked in a low voice.

“After your mother gets back.” Ted sighed, glanced out the win-dow, then looked down at his hands, which were folded on one crossed knee. He didn’t look at Bobby, not yet. “Probably Friday morning. I can’t collect my money until tomorrow night. I got four to one on Albini; that’s two grand. My good pal Lennie will have to phone New York to make the cover.”

They crossed a canal bridge, and down there was back there. Now they were in the part of the city Bobby had travelled with his mother. The men on the street wore coats and ties. The women wore hose instead of bobbysocks. None of them looked like Alanna Files, and Bobby didn’t think many of them would smell of liquor if they went “Shhh,” either. Not at four o’clock in the afternoon.

“I know why you didn’t bet on Patterson–Johansson,” Bobby said. “It’s because you don’t know who’ll win.”

“I think Patterson will this time,” Ted said, “because this time he’s prepared for Johansson. I might flutter two dollars on Floyd Patter-son, but five hundred? To bet five hundred you must either know or be crazy.”

“The Albini–Haywood fight is fixed, isn’t it?”

Ted nodded. “I knew when you read that Kleindienst was involved, and I guessed that Albini was supposed to win.”

“You’ve made other bets on boxing matches where Mr. Klein-dienst was a manager.”

Ted said nothing for a moment, only looked out the window. On the radio, someone hit a comebacker to Whitey Ford. Ford fielded the ball and threw to Moose Skowron at first. Now there were two down in the top of the eighth. At last Ted said, “It could have been Haywood. It wasn’t likely, but it could have been. Then . . . did you see the old man back there? The one in the shoeshine chair?”

“Sure, you patted him on the cheeks.”

“That’s Arthur Girardi. Files lets him hang around because he used to be connected. That’s what Files thinks—used to be. Now he’s just some old fellow who comes in to get his shoes shined at ten and then forgets and comes in to get them shined again at three. Files thinks he’s just an old fellow who don’t know from nothing, as they say. Girardi lets him think whatever he wants to think. If Files said the moon was green cheese, Girardi wouldn’t say boo. Old Gee, he comes in for the air conditioning. And he’s still connected.”

“Connected to Jimmy Gee.”

“To all sorts of guys.”

“Mr. Files didn’t know the fight was fixed?”

“No, not for sure. I thought he would.”

“But old Gee knew. And he knew which one’s supposed to take the dive.”

“Yes. That was my luck. Hurricane Haywood goes down in the eighth round. Then, next year when the odds are better, the Hurri-cane gets his payday.”

“Would you have bet if Mr. Girardi hadn’t been there?”

“No,” Ted replied immediately.

“Then what would you have done for money? When you go away?”

Ted looked depressed at those words—When you go away. He made as if to put an arm around Bobby’s shoulders, then stopped himself.

“There’s always someone who knows something,” he said.

They were on Asher Avenue now, still in Bridgeport but only a mile or so from the Harwich town line. Knowing what would hap-pen, Bobby reached for Ted’s big, nicotine-stained hand.

Ted swivelled his knees toward the door, taking his hands with them. “Better not.”

Bobby didn’t need to ask why. People put up signs that said WET PAINTDO NOTTOUCH because if you put your hand on something newly painted, the stuff would get on your skin. You could wash it off, or it would wear off by itself in time, but for awhile it would be there.

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I feel bad,” Bobby said. He could feel tears prickling at the cor-ners of his eyes. “If something happens to you, it’s my fault. I saw things, the things you told me to look out for, but I didn’t say any-thing. I didn’t want you to go. So I told myself you were crazy—not about everything, just about the low men you thought were chasing you—and I didn’t say anything. You gave me a job and I muffed it.”

Ted’s arm rose again. He lowered it and settled for giving Bobby a quick pat on the leg instead. At Yankee Stadium Tony Kubek had just doubled home two runs. The crowd was going wild.

“But I knew,” Ted said mildly.

Bobby stared at him. “What? I don’t get you.”

“I felt them getting closer. That’s why my trances have grown so frequent. Yet I lied to myself, just as you did. For the same reasons, too. Do you think I want to leave you now, Bobby? When your mother is so confused and unhappy? In all honesty I don’t care so much for her sake, we don’t get along, from the first second we laid eyes on each other we didn’t get along, but she is your mother, and—”

“What’s wrong with her?” Bobby asked. He remembered to keep his voice low, but he took Ted’s arm and shook it. “Tell me! You know, I know you do! Is it Mr. Biderman? Is it something about Mr. Bider-man?”

Ted looked out the window, brow furrowed, lips drawn down tightly. At last he sighed, pulled out his cigarettes, and lit one. “Bobby,” he said, “Mr. Biderman is not a nice man. Your mother knows it, but she also knows that sometimes we have to go along with people who are not nice. Go along to get along, she thinks, and she has done this. She’s done things over the last year that she’s not proud of, but she has been careful. In some ways she has needed to be as careful as I have, and whether I like her or not, I admire her for that.”

“What did she do? What did he make her do?” Something cold moved in Bobby’s chest. “Why did Mr. Biderman take her to Providence?”

“For the real-estate conference.”

“Is that all? Is that all?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t know. Or perhaps she has covered over what she knows and what she fears with what she hopes. I can’t say. Sometimes I can—sometimes I know things very directly and clearly. The first moment I saw you I knew that you wanted a bicycle, that get-ting one was very important to you, and you meant to earn the money for one this summer if you could. I admired your determination.”

“You touched me on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Yes indeed. The first time, anyway. I did it to know you a little. But friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too. Besides, when I touch, I pass on a kind of—well, a kind of window. I think you know that. The second time I touched you . . . really touching, holding on, you know what I mean . . . that was a mistake, but not such an awful one; for a little while you knew more than you should, but it wore off, didn’t it? If I’d gone on, though . . . touching and touching, the way people do when they’re close . . . there’d come a point where things would change. Where it wouldn’t wear off.” He raised his mostly smoked cigarette and looked at it distastefully. “The way you smoke one too many of these and you’re hooked for life.”

“Is my mother all right now?” Bobby asked, knowing that Ted couldn’t tell him that; Ted’s gift, whatever it was, didn’t stretch that far.

“I don’t know. I—”

Ted suddenly stiffened. He was looking out the window at some-thing up ahead. He smashed his cigarette into the armrest ashtray, doing it hard enough to send sparks scattering across the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to feel them. “Christ,” he said. “Oh Christ, Bobby, we’re in for it.”

Bobby leaned across his lap to look out the window, thinking in the back of his mind about what Ted had just been saying—touching

and touching, the way people do when they’re close—even as he peered up Asher Avenue.

Ahead was a three-way intersection, Asher Avenue, Bridgeport Avenue, and the Connecticut Pike all coming together at a place known as Puritan Square. Trolley-tracks gleamed in the afternoon sun; delivery trucks honked impatiently as they waited their turns to dart through the crush. A sweating policeman with a whistle in his mouth and white gloves on his hands was directing traffic. Off to the left was the William Penn Grille, a famous restaurant which was sup-posed to have the best steaks in Connecticut (Mr. Biderman had taken the whole office staff there after the agency sold the Waverley Estate, and Bobby’s mom had come home with about a dozen William Penn Grille books of matches). Its main claim to fame, his mom had once told Bobby, was that the bar was over the Harwich town line, but the restaurant proper was in Bridgeport.

Parked in front, on the very edge of Puritan Square, was a DeSoto automobile of a purple Bobby had never seen before—had never even suspected. The color was so bright it hurt his eyes to look at it. It hurt his whole head.

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.

The purple car was loaded with swoops and darts of chrome. It had fenderskirts. The hood ornament was huge; Chief DeSoto’s head glittered in the hazy light like a fake jewel. The tires were fat white-walls and the hubcaps were spinners. There was a whip antenna on the back. From its tip there hung a raccoon tail.

“The low men,” Bobby whispered. There was really no question. It was a DeSoto, but at the same time it was like no car he had ever seen in his life, something as alien as an asteroid. As they drew closer to the clogged three-way intersection, Bobby saw the upholstery was a metallic dragonfly-green—the color nearly howled in contrast to the car’s purple skin. There was white fur around the steering wheel. “Holy crow, it’s them!”

“You have to take your mind away,” Ted said. He grabbed Bobby by the shoulders (up front the Yankees blared on and on, the driver paying his two fares in the back seat no attention whatsoever, thank God for that much, at least) and shook him once, hard, before letting him go. “You have to take your mind away, do you under-stand?”

He did. George Sanders had built a brick wall behind which to hide his thoughts and plans from the Children. Bobby had used Maury Wills once before, but he didn’t think baseball was going to cut it this time. What would?

Bobby could see the Asher Empire’s marquee jutting out over the sidewalk, three or four blocks beyond Puritan Square, and suddenly he could hear the sound of Sully-John’s Bo-lo Bouncer: whap-whap-whap. If she’s trash, S-J had said, I’d love to be the trashman.

The poster they’d seen that day filled Bobby’s mind: Brigitte Bar-dot (the French sex-kitten was what the papers called her) dressed only in a towel and a smile. She looked a little like the woman get-ting out of the car on one of the calendars back at The Corner Pocket, the one with most of her skirt in her lap and her garters showing. Brigitte Bardot was prettier, though. And she was real. She was too old for the likes of Bobby Garfield, of course

(I’m so young and you’re so old, Paul Anka singing from a thou-sand transistor radios, this my darling I’ve been told )

but she was still beautiful, and a cat could look at a queen, his mother always said that, too: a cat could look at a queen. Bobby saw her more and more clearly as he settled back against the seat, his eyes taking on that drifty, far-off look Ted’s eyes got when he had one of his blank-outs; Bobby saw her shower-damp puff of blond hair, the slope of her breasts into the towel, her long thighs, her painted toe-nails standing over the words Adults Only, Must Have Driver’s License or Birth Certificate. He could smell her soap—something light and flowery. He could smell

(Nuit en Paris)

her perfume and he could hear her radio in the next room. It was Freddy Cannon, that bebop summertime avatar of Savin Rock: “She’s dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop, she’s stompin to the shag, rocks the bunny hop . . .”

He was aware—faintly, far away, in another world farther up along the swirls of the spinning top—that the cab in which they were riding had come to a stop right next to the William Penn Grille, right next to that purple bruise of a DeSoto. Bobby could almost hear the car in his head; if it had had a voice it would have screamed Shoot me, I’m too purple! Shoot me, I’m too purple! And not far beyond it he could sense them. They were in the restaurant, having an early steak. Both of them ate it the same way, bloody-rare. Before they left they might put up a lost-pet poster in the telephone lounge or a hand-printed CAR FOR SALE BY OWNER card: upside-down, of course. They were in there, low men in yellow coats and white shoes drinking mar-tinis between bites of nearly raw steer, and if they turned their minds out this way . . .

Steam was drifting out of the shower. B.B. raised herself on her bare painted toes and opened her towel, turning it into brief wings before letting it fall. And Bobby saw it wasn’t Brigitte Bardot at all. It was Carol Gerber. You’d have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel, she had said, and now she had let even the towel fall away. He was seeing her as she would look eight or ten years from now.

Bobby looked at her, helpless to look away, helpless in love, lost in the smells of her soap and her perfume, the sound of her radio (Freddy Cannon had given way to The Platters—heavenly shades of night are falling), the sight of her small painted toenails. His heart spun as a top did, with its lines rising and disappearing into other worlds. Other worlds than this.

The taxi began creeping forward. The four-door purple horror parked next to the restaurant (parked in a loading zone, Bobby saw, but what did they care?) began to slide to the rear. The cab jolted to a stop again and the driver cursed mildly as a trolley rushed clang-a-lang through Puritan Square. The low DeSoto was behind them now, but reflections from its chrome filled the cab with erratic dancing minnows of light. And suddenly Bobby felt a savage itching attack the backs of his eyeballs. This was followed by a fall of twisting black threads across his field of vision. He was able to hold onto Carol, but he now seemed to be looking at her through a field of interference.

They sense us . . . or they sense something. Please God, get us out of here. Please get us out.

The cabbie saw a hole in the traffic and squirted through it. A moment later they were rolling up Asher Avenue at a good pace. That itching sensation behind Bobby’s eyes began to recede. The black threads across his field of interior vision cleared away, and when they did he saw that the naked girl wasn’t Carol at all (not anymore, at least), not even Brigitte Bardot, but only the calendar-girl from The Corner Pocket, stripped mother-naked by Bobby’s imagination. The music from her radio was gone. The smells of soap and perfume were gone. The life had gone out of her; she was just a . . . a . . .

“She’s just a picture painted on a brick wall,” Bobby said. He sat up.

“Say what, kid?” the driver asked, and snapped off the radio. The game was over. Mel Allen was selling cigarettes.

“Nothing,” Bobby said.

“Guess youse dozed off, huh? Slow traffic, hot day . . . they’ll do it every time, just like Hatlo says. Looks like your pal’s still out.”

“No,” Ted said, straightening. “T he doctor is in.” He stretched his back and winced when it crackled. “I did doze a little, though.” He glanced out the back window, but the William Penn Grille was out of sight now. “The Yankees won, I suppose?”

“Gahdam Injuns, they roont em,” the cabbie said, and laughed. “Don’t see how youse could sleep with the Yankees playing.”

They turned onto Broad Street; two minutes later the cab pulled up in front of 149. Bobby looked at it as if expecting to see a differ-ent color paint or perhaps an added wing. He felt like he’d been gone ten years. In a way he supposed he had been—hadn’t he seen Carol Gerber all grown up?

I’m going to marry her, Bobby decided as he got out of the cab. Over on Colony Street, Mrs. O’Hara’s dog barked on and on, as if denying this and all human aspirations: roop-roop, roop-roop-roop.

Ted bent down to the driver’s-side window with his wallet in his hand. He plucked out two singles, considered, then added a third.

“Keep the change.”

“You’re a gent,” the cabbie said.

“He’s a shooter,” Bobby corrected, and grinned as the cab pulled away.

“Let’s get inside,” Ted said. “It’s not safe for me to be out here.”

They went up the porch steps and Bobby used his key to open the door to the foyer. He kept thinking about that weird itching behind his eyes, and the black threads. The threads had been particularly horrible, as if he’d been on the verge of going blind. “Did they see us, Ted? Or sense us, or whatever they do?”

“You know they did . . . but I don’t think they knew how close we were.” As they went into the Garfield apartment, Ted took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “You must have covered up well. Whooo! Hot in here!”

“What makes you think they didn’t know we were close?”

Ted paused in the act of opening a window, giving Bobby a level look back over his shoulder. “If they’d known, that purple car would have been right behind us when we pulled up here.”

“It wasn’t a car,” Bobby said, beginning to open windows himself. It didn’t help much; the air that came in, lifting the curtains in list-less little flaps, felt almost as hot as the air which had been trapped inside the apartment all day. “I don’t know what it was, but it only looked like a car. And what I felt of them—” Even in the heat, Bobby shivered.

Ted got his fan, crossed to the window by Liz’s shelf of knickknacks, and set it on the sill. “They camouflage themselves as best they can, but we still feel them. Even people who don’t know what they are often feel them. A little of what’s under the camouflage seeps through, and what’s underneath is ugly. I hope you never know how ugly.”

Bobby hoped so, too. “Where do they come from, Ted?”

“A dark place.”

Ted knelt, plugged in his fan, flipped it on. T he air it pulled into the room was a little cooler, but not so cool as The Corner Pocket had been, or the Criterion.

“Is it in another world, like in Ring Around the Sun? It is, isn’t it?”

Ted was still on his knees by the electrical plug. He looked as if he were praying. To Bobby he also looked exhausted—done almost to death. How could he run from the low men? He didn’t look as if he could make it as far as Spicer’s Variety Store without stumbling.

“Yes,” he said at last. “They come from another world. Another where and another when. That’s all I can tell you. It’s not safe for you to know more.”

But Bobby had to ask one other question. “Did you come from one of those other worlds?”

Ted looked at him solemnly. “I came from Teaneck.”

Bobby gaped at him for a moment, then began to laugh. Ted, still kneeling by the fan, joined him.

“What did you think of in the cab, Bobby?” Ted asked when they were finally able to stop. “Where did you go when the trouble started?” He paused. “What did you see?”

Bobby thought of Carol at twenty with her toenails painted pink, Carol standing naked with the towel at her feet and steam rising around her. Adults Only. Must Have Driver’s License. No Exceptions.

“I can’t tell,” he said at last. “Because . . . well . . .”

“Because some things are private. I understand.” Ted got to his feet. Bobby stepped forward to help him but Ted waved him away. “Perhaps you’d like to go out and play for a little while,” he said. “Later on—around six, shall we say?—I’ll put on my dark glasses again and we’ll go around the block, have a bite of dinner at the Colony Diner.”

“But no beans.”

The corners of Ted’s mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile. “Absolutely no beans, beans verboten. At ten o’clock I’ll call my friend Len and see how the fight went. Eh?”

“The low men . . . will they be looking for me now, too?”

“I’d never let you step out the door if I thought that,” Ted replied, looking surprised. “You’re fine, and I’m going to make sure you stay fine. Go on now. Play some catch or ring-a-levio or whatever it is you like. I have some things to do. Only be back by six so I don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

Bobby went into his room and dumped the four quarters he’d taken to Bridgeport back into the Bike Fund jar. He looked around his room, seeing things with new eyes: the cowboy bedspread, the picture of his mother on one wall and the signed photo—obtained by saving cereal boxtops—of Clayton Moore in his mask on another, his roller skates (one with a broken strap) in the corner, his desk against the wall. The room looked smaller now—not so much a place to come to as a place to leave. He realized he was growing into his orange library card, and some bitter voice inside cried out against it. Cried no, no, no.