Hearts In Atlantis

VIII. BOBBY MAKES A CONFESSION.THE GERBER BABY AND THE MALTEX BABY.RIONDA. TED MAKES A CALL. CRY OF THE HUNTERS.

In Commonwealth Park the little kids were playing ticky-ball. Field B was empty; on Field C a few teenagers in orange St. Gabriel’s tee-shirts were playing scrub. Carol Gerber was sitting on a bench with her jump-rope in her lap, watching them. She saw Bobby coming and began to smile. Then the smile went away.

“Bobby, what’s wrong with you?”

Bobby hadn’t been precisely aware that anything was wrong with him until Carol said that, but the look of concern on her face brought everything home and undid him. It was the reality of the low men and the fright of the close call they’d had on their way back from Bridgeport; it was his concern over his mother; mostly it was Ted. He knew perfectly well why Ted had shooed him out of the house, and what Ted was doing right now: filling his little suitcases and those carryhandle paper bags. His friend was going away.

Bobby began to cry. He didn’t want to go all ushy-gushy in front of a girl, particularly this girl, but he couldn’t help it.

Carol looked stunned for a moment—scared. Then she got off the bench, came to him, and put her arms around him. “That’s all right,” she said. “That’s all right, Bobby, don’t cry, everything’s all right.”

Almost blinded by tears and crying harder than ever—it was as if there were a violent summer storm going on in his head—Bobby let her lead him into a copse of trees where they would be hidden from the baseball fields and the main paths. She sat down on the grass, still holding him, brushing one hand through the sweaty bristles of his crewcut. For a little while she said nothing at all, and Bobby was incapable of speaking; he could only sob until his throat ached and his eyeballs throbbed in their sockets.

At last the intervals between sobs became longer. He sat up and wiped his face with his arm, horrified and ashamed of what he felt: not just tears but snot and spit as well. He must have covered her with mung.

Carol didn’t seem to care. She touched his wet face. Bobby pulled back from her fingers, uttering another sob, and looked down at the grass. His eyesight, freshly washed by his tears, seemed almost preternaturally keen; he could see every blade and dandelion.

“It’s all right,” she said, but Bobby was still too ashamed to look at her.

They sat quietly for a little while and then Carol said, “Bobby, I’ll be your girlfriend, if you want.”

“You are my girlfriend,” Bobby said.

“Then tell me what’s wrong.”

And Bobby heard himself telling her everything, starting with the day Ted had moved in and how his mother had taken an instant dis-like to him. He told her about the first of Ted’s blank-outs, about the low men, about the signs of the low men. When he got to that part, Carol touched him on the arm.

“What?” he asked. “You don’t believe me?” His throat still had that achy too-full feeling it got after a crying fit, but he was getting better. If she didn’t believe him, he wouldn’t be mad at her. Wouldn’t blame her a bit, in fact. It was just an enormous relief to get it off his chest. “That’s okay. I know how crazy it must—”

“I’ve seen those funny hopscotches all over town,” she said. “So has Yvonne and Angie. We talked about them. They have little stars and moons drawn next to them. Sometimes comets, too.”

He gaped at her. “Are you kidding?”

“No. Girls always look at hopscotches, I don’t know why. Close your mouth before a bug flies in.”

He closed his mouth.

Carol nodded, satisfied, then took his hand in hers and laced her fingers through his. Bobby was amazed at what a perfect fit all those fingers made. “Now tell me the rest.”

He did, finishing with the amazing day he’d just put in: the movie, the trip to The Corner Pocket, how Alanna had recognized his father in him, the close call on the way home. He tried to explain how the purple DeSoto hadn’t seemed like a real car at all, that it only looked like a car. The closest he could come was to say it had felt alive some-how, like an evil version of the ostrich Dr. Dolittle sometimes rode in that series of talking-animal books they’d all gone crazy for in the second grade. The only thing Bobby didn’t confess was where he’d hidden his thoughts when the cab passed the William Penn Grille and the backs of his eyes began to itch.

He struggled, then blurted the worst as a coda: he was afraid that his mother going to Providence with Mr. Biderman and those other men had been a mistake. A bad mistake.

“Do you think Mr. Biderman’s sweet on her?” Carol asked. By then they were walking back to the bench where she had left her jump-rope. Bobby picked it up and handed it to her. They began walking out of the park and toward Broad Street.

“Yeah, maybe,” Bobby said glumly. “Or at least . . .” And here was part of what he was afraid of, although it had no name or real shape; it was like something ominous covered with a piece of canvas. “At least she thinks he is.”

“Is he going to ask her to marry him? If he did he’d be your step-dad.”

“God!” Bobby hadn’t considered the idea of having Don Bider-man as a stepfather, and he wished with all his might that Carol hadn’t brought such a thing up. It was an awful thought.

“If she loves him you just better get used to the idea.” Carol spoke in an older-woman, worldly-wise fashion that Bobby could have done without; he guessed she had already spent too much time this summer watching the oh John, oh Marsha shows on TV with her mom. And in a weird way he wouldn’t have cared if his mom loved Mr. Biderman and that was all. It would be wretched, certainly, because Mr. Bider-man was a creep, but it would have been understandable. More was going on, though. His mother’s miserliness about money—her cheap-skatiness—was a part of it, and so was whatever had made her start smoking again and caused her to cry in the night sometimes. The dif-ference between his mother’s Randall Garfield, the untrustworthy man who left the unpaid bills, and Alanna’s Randy Garfield, the nice guy who liked the jukebox turned up loud . . . even that might be a part of it. (Had there really been unpaid bills? Had there really been a lapsed insurance policy? Why would his mother lie about such things?) This was stuff he couldn’t talk about to Carol. It wasn’t ret-icence; it was that he didn’t know how.

They started up the hill. Bobby took one end of her rope and they walked side by side, dragging it between them on the sidewalk. Sud-denly Bobby stopped and pointed. “Look.”

There was a yellow length of kite tail hanging from one of the electrical wires crossing the street farther up. It dangled in a curve that looked sort of like a question mark.

“Yeah, I see it,” Carol said, sounding subdued. They began to walk again. “He should go today, Bobby.”

“He can’t. The fight’s tonight. If Albini wins Ted’s got to get his dough at the billiard parlor tomorrow night. I think he needs it pretty bad.”

“Sure he does,” Carol said. “You only have to look at his clothes to see he’s almost broke. What he bet was probably the last money he had.”

His clothes—that’s something only a girl would notice, Bobby thought, and opened his mouth to tell her so. Before he could, some-one behind them said, “Oh looka this. It’s the Gerber Baby and the Maltex Baby. Howya doin, babies?”

They looked around. Biking slowly up the hill toward them were three St. Gabe’s boys in orange shirts. Piled in their bike-baskets was an assortment of baseball gear. One of the boys, a pimply galoot with a silver cross dangling from his neck on a chain, had a baseball bat in a homemade sling on his back. Thinks he’s Robin Hood, Bobby thought, but he was scared. They were big boys, high-school boys, parochial school boys, and if they decided they wanted to put him in the hospital, then to the hospital he would go. Low boys in orange shirts, he thought.

“Hi, Willie,” Carol said to one of them—not the galoot with the bat slung on his back. She sounded calm, even cheery, but Bobby could hear fright fluttering underneath like a bird’s wing. “I watched you play. You made a good catch.”

The one she spoke to had an ugly, half-formed face below a mass of combed-back auburn hair and above a man’s body. The Huffy bike beneath him was ridiculously small. Bobby thought he looked like a troll in a fairy-tale. “What’s it to you, Gerber Baby?” he asked.

The three St. Gabe’s boys pulled up even with them. Then two of them—the one with the dangling cross and the one Carol had called Willie—came a little farther, standing around the forks of their bikes now, walking them. With mounting dismay Bobby realized he and Carol had been surrounded. He could smell a mixture of sweat and Vitalis coming from the boys in the orange shirts.

“Who are you, Maltex Baby?” the third St. Gabe’s boy asked Bobby. He leaned over the handlebars of his bike for a better look. “Are you Garfield? You are, ain’tcha? Billy Donahue’s still lookin for you from that time last winter. He wants to knock your teeth out. Maybe I ought to knock one or two of em out right here, give im a head start.”

Bobby felt a wretched crawling sensation begin in his stomach— something like snakes in a basket. I won’t cry again, he told himself. Whatever happens I won’t cry again even if they send me to the hos-pital. And I’ll try to protect her.

Protect her from big kids like this? It was a joke.“Why are you being so mean, Willie?” Carol asked. She spoke solely to the boy with the auburn hair. “You’re not mean when you’re by yourself. Why do you have to be mean now?”

Willie flushed. That, coupled with his dark red hair—much darker than Bobby’s—made him look on fire from the neck up. Bobby guessed he didn’t like his friends knowing he could act like a human being when they weren’t around.

“Shut up, Gerber Baby!” he snarled. “Why don’t you just shut up and kiss your boyfriend while he’s still got all his teeth?”

The third boy was wearing a motorcycle belt cinched on the side and ancient Snap-Jack shoes covered with dirt from the baseball field. He was behind Carol. Now he moved in closer, still walking his bike, and grabbed her ponytail with both hands. He pulled it.

“Ow!” Carol almost screamed. She sounded surprised as well as hurt. She pulled away so hard that she almost fell down. Bobby caught her and Willie—who could be nice when he wasn’t with his pals, according to Carol—laughed.

“Why’d you do that?” Bobby yelled at the boy in the motorcycle belt, and as the words came out of his mouth it was as if he had heard them a thousand times before. All of this was like a ritual, the stuff that got said before the real yanks and pushes began and the fists began to fly. He thought of Lord of the Flies again—Ralph running from Jack and the others. At least on Golding’s island there had been jungle. He and Carol had nowhere to run.

He says “Because I felt like it.” That’s what comes next.

But before the boy with the side-cinched belt could say it, Robin Hood with the homemade bat-sling on his back said it for him. “Because he felt like it. Whatcha gonna do about it, Maltex Baby?” He suddenly flicked out one hand, snake-quick, and slapped Bobby across the face. Willie laughed again.

Carol started toward him. “Willie, please don’t—”

Robin Hood reached out, grabbed the front of Carol’s shirt, and squeezed. “Got any titties yet? Nah, not much. You ain’t nothing but a Gerber Baby.” He pushed her. Bobby, his head still ringing from the slap, caught her and for the second time kept her from falling down.

“Let’s beat this queer up,” the kid in the motorcycle belt said. “I hate his face.”

They moved in, the wheels of their bikes squeaking solemnly. Then Willie let his drop on its side like a dead pony and reached for Bobby. Bobby raised his fists in a feeble imitation of Floyd Patterson.

“Say, boys, what’s going on?” someone asked from behind them.

Willie had drawn one of his own fists back. Still holding it cocked, he looked over his shoulder. So did Robin Hood and the boy with the motorcycle belt. Parked at the curb was an old blue Studebaker with rusty rocker panels and a magnetic Jesus on the dashboard. Standing in front of it, looking extremely busty in the chest and extremely wide in the hip, was Anita Gerber’s friend Rionda. Summer clothes were never going to be her friends (even at eleven Bobby understood this), but at that moment she looked like a goddess in pedal pushers.

“Rionda!” Carol yelled—not crying, but almost. She pushed past Willie and the boy in the motorcycle belt. Neither made any effort to stop her. All three of the St. Gabe’s boys were staring at Rionda. Bobby found himself looking at Willie’s cocked fist. Sometimes Bobby woke up in the morning with his peter just as hard as a rock, standing straight up like a moon rocket or something. As he went into the bathroom to pee, it would soften and wilt. Willie’s cocked arm was wilting like that now, the fist at the end of it relaxing back into fingers, and the comparison made Bobby want to smile. He resisted the urge. If they saw him smiling now, they could do noth-ing. Later, however . . . on another day . . .

Rionda put her arms around Carol and hugged the girl to her large bosom. She surveyed the boys in the orange shirts and she was smil-ing. Smiling and making no effort to hide it.

“Willie Shearman, isn’t it?”

The formerly cocked-back arm dropped to Willie’s side. Mutter-ing, he bent to pick up his bike.

“Richie O’Meara?”

The boy in the motorcycle belt looked at the toes of his dusty Snap-Jacks and also muttered something. His cheeks burned with color.

“One of the O’Meara boys, anyway, there’s so damned many of you now I can’t keep track.” Her eyes shifted to Robin Hood. “And who are you, big boy? Are you a Dedham? You look a little bit like a Dedham.”

Robin Hood looked at his hands. He wore a class ring on one of his fingers and now he began to twist it.

Rionda still had an arm around Carol’s shoulders. Carol had one of her own arms as far around Rionda’s waist as she could manage. She walked with Rionda, not looking at the boys, as Rionda stepped up from the street onto the little strip of grass between the curb and the sidewalk. She was still looking at Robin Hood. “You better answer me when I talk to you, sonny. Won’t be hard to find your mother if I want to try. All I have to do is ask Father Fitzgerald.”

“Harry Doolin, that’s me,” the boy said at last. He was twirling his class ring faster than ever.

“Well, but I was close, wasn’t I?” Rionda asked pleasantly, taking another two or three steps forward. They put her on the sidewalk. Carol, afraid to be so close to the boys, tried to hold her back, but Rionda would have none of it. “Dedhams and Doolins, all married together. Right back to County Cork, tra-la-tra-lee.”

Not Robin Hood but a kid named Harry Doolin with a stupid homemade bat-sling strapped to his back. Not Marlon Brando from The Wild One but a kid named Richie O’Meara, who wouldn’t have a Harley to go with his motorcycle belt for another five years . . . if ever. And Willie Shearman, who didn’t dare to be nice to a girl when he was with his friends. All it took to shrink them back to their proper size was one overweight woman in pedal pushers and a shell top, who had ridden to the rescue not on a white stallion but in a 1954 Studebaker. The thought should have comforted Bobby but it didn’t. He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser and good for them . . . but who would rescue the crew?

That was stupid, no one ever looked less in need of rescuing than Rionda Hewson did at that moment, but the words still haunted Bobby. What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just play-ground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

Rionda was still looking at the St. Gabe’s boys with her hard and rather dangerous smile. “You three fellas wouldn’t’ve been picking on kids younger and smaller than yourselves, would you? One of them a girl like your own little sisters?”

They were silent, not even muttering now. They only shuffled their feet.

“I’m sure you weren’t, because that would be a cowardly thing to do, now wouldn’t it?”

Again she gave them a chance to reply and plenty of time to hear their own silence.

“Willie? Richie? Harry? You weren’t picking on them, were you?”

“Course not,” Harry said. Bobby thought that if he spun that ring of his much faster, his finger would probably catch fire.

“If I thought a thing like that,” Rionda said, still smiling her dan-gerous smile, “I’d have to go talk to Father Fitzgerald, wouldn’t I? And the Father, he’d probably feel he had to talk to your folks, and your fathers’d probably feel obliged to warm your asses for you . . . and you’d deserve it, boys, wouldn’t you? For picking on the weak and small.”

Continued silence from the three boys, all now astride their ridicu-lously undersized bikes again.

“Did they pick on you, Bobby?” Rionda asked.

“No,” Bobby said at once.

Rionda put a finger under Carol’s chin and turned her face up. “Did they pick on you, lovey?”

“No, Rionda.”

Rionda smiled down at her, and although there were tears stand-ing in Carol’s eyes, she smiled back.

“Well, boys, I guess you’re off the hook,” Rionda said. “They say you haven’t done nothing that’ll cause you a single extra uncomfy minute in the confessional. I’d say that you owe them a vote of thanks, don’t you?”

Mutter-mutter-mutter from the St. Gabe’s boys. Please let it go at that, Bobby pleaded silently. Don’t make them actually thank us. Don’t rub their noses in it.

Perhaps Rionda heard his thought (Bobby now had good reason to believe such things were possible). “Well,” she said, “maybe we can skip that part. Get along home, boys. And Harry, when you see Moira Dedham, tell her Rionda says she still goes to the Bingo over in Bridgeport every week, if she ever wants a ride.”

“I will, sure,” Harry said. He mounted his bike and rode away up the hill, eyes still on the sidewalk. Had there been pedestrians com-ing the other way, he would likely have run them over. His two friends followed him, standing on their pedals to catch up.

Rionda watched them go, her smile slowly fading. “Shanty Irish,” she said at last, “just trouble waiting to happen. Bah, good riddance to em. Carol, are you really all right?”

Carol said she really was.

“Bobby?”

“Sure, I’m fine.” It was taking him all the discipline he could man-age not to start shaking right in front of her like a bowl of cranberry jelly, but if Carol could keep from falling apart, he guessed he could.

“Get in the car,” Rionda said to Carol. “I’ll give you a lift up to your house. You move along yourself, Bobby—scoot across the street and go inside. Those boys will have forgotten all about you and my Carol-girl by tomorrow, but tonight it might be smart for both of you to stay inside.”

“Okay,” Bobby said, knowing they wouldn’t have forgotten by tomorrow, nor by the end of the week, nor by the end of the summer. He and Carol were going to have to watch out for Harry and his friends for a long time. “Bye, Carol.”

“Bye.”

Bobby trotted across Broad Street. On the other side he stood watching Rionda’s old car go up to the apartment house where the Gerbers lived. When Carol got out she looked back down the hill and waved. Bobby waved back, then walked up the porch steps of 149 and went inside.

Ted was sitting in the living room, smoking a cigarette and read-ing Life magazine. Anita Ekberg was on the cover. Bobby had no doubt that Ted’s suitcases and the paper bags were packed, but there was no sign of them; he must have left them upstairs in his room. Bobby was glad. He didn’t want to look at them. It was bad enough just knowing they were there.

“What did you do?” Ted asked.

“Not much,” Bobby said. “I think I’ll lie down on my bed and read until supper.”

He went into his room. Stacked on the floor by his bed were three books from the adult section of the Harwich Public Library—Cosmic Engineers, by Clifford D. Simak; The Roman Hat Mystery, by Ellery Queen; and The Inheritors, by William Golding. Bobby chose The Inheritors and lay down with his head at the foot of his bed and his stocking feet on his pillow. There were cave people on the book’s cover, but they were drawn in a way that was almost abstract—you’d never see cave people like that on the cover of a kids’ book. Having an adult library card was very neat . . . but somehow not as neat as it had seemed at first.

Hawaiian Eye was on at nine o’clock, and Bobby ordinarily would have been mesmerized (his mother claimed that shows like Hawai-ian Eye and The Untouchables were too violent for children and ordinarily would not let him watch them), but tonight his mind kept wandering from the story. Less than sixty miles from here Eddie Albini and Hurricane Haywood would be mixing it up; the Gillette Blue Blades Girl, dressed in a blue bathing suit and blue high heels, would be parading around the ring before the start of every round and holding up a sign with a blue number on it. 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . .

By nine-thirty Bobby couldn’t have picked out the private eye on the TV show, let alone guessed who had murdered the blond socialite. Hurricane Haywood goes down in the eighth round, Ted had told him; Old Gee knew it. But what if something went wrong? He didn’t want Ted to go, but if he had to, Bobby couldn’t bear the thought of him going with an empty wallet. Surely that couldn’t happen, though . . . or could it? Bobby had seen a TV show where a fighter was supposed to take a dive and then changed his mind. What if that happened tonight? Taking a dive was bad, it was cheat-ing—no shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue?—but if Hurricane Haywood didn’t cheat, Ted would be in a lot of trouble; “hurtin for certain” was how Sully-John would have put it.

Nine-thirty according to the sunburst clock on the living-room wall. If Bobby’s math was right, the crucial eighth round was now underway.

“How do you like The Inheritors?”

Bobby was so deep into his own thoughts that Ted’s voice made him jump. On TV, Keenan Wynn was standing in front of a bulldozer and saying he’d walk a mile for a Camel.

“It’s a lot harder than Lord of the Flies,” he said. “It seems like there are these two little families of cave people wandering around, and one family is smarter. But the other family, the dumb family, they’re the heroes. I almost gave up, but now it’s getting more inter-esting. I guess I’ll stick with it.”

“The family you meet first, the one with the little girl, they’re Neanderthals. The second family—only that one’s really a tribe, Golding and his tribes—are Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons are the inheritors. What happens between the two groups satisfies the definition of tragedy: events tending toward an unhappy outcome which cannot be avoided.”

Ted went on, talking about plays by Shakespeare and poems by Poe and novels by a guy named Theodore Dreiser. Ordinarily Bobby would have been interested, but tonight his mind kept going to Madison Square Garden. He could see the ring, lit as savagely as the few working pool-tables in The Corner Pocket had been. He could hear the crowd screaming as Haywood poured it on, smacking the surprised Eddie Albini with lefts and rights. Haywood wasn’t going to tank the fight; like the boxer in the TV show, he was going to show the other guy a serious world of hurt instead. Bobby could smell sweat and hear the heavy biff and baff of gloves on flesh. Eddie Albini’s eyes came up double zeros . . . his knees buckled . . . the crowd was on its feet, screaming . . .

“—the idea of fate as a force which can’t be escaped seems to start with the Greeks. There was a playwright named Euripides who—”

“Call,” Bobby said, and although he’d never had a cigarette in his life (by 1964 he would be smoking over a carton a week), his voice sounded as harsh as Ted’s did late at night, after a day’s worth of Chesterfields.

“Beg your pardon, Bobby?”

“Call Mr. Files and see about the fight.” Bobby looked at the sun-burst clock. Nine-forty-nine. “If it only went eight, it’ll be over now.”

“I agree that the fight is over, but if I call Files so soon he may sus-pect I knew something,” Ted said. “Not from the radio, either—this one isn’t on the radio, as we both know. It’s better to wait. Safer. Let him believe I am a man of inspired hunches. I’ll call at ten, as if I expected the result to be a decision instead of a knockout. And in the meantime, Bobby, don’t worry. I tell you it’s a stroll on the boardwalk.”

Bobby gave up trying to follow Hawaiian Eye at all; he just sat on the couch and listened to the actors quack. A man shouted at a fat Hawaiian cop. A woman in a white bathing suit ran into the surf. One car chased another while drums throbbed on the soundtrack. The hands on the sunburst clock crawled, struggling toward the ten and the twelve like climbers negotiating the last few hundred feet of Mount Everest. The man who’d murdered the socialite was killed himself as he ran around in a pineapple field and Hawaiian Eye finally ended.

Bobby didn’t wait for the previews of next week’s show; he snapped off the TV and said, “Call, okay? Please call.”

“In a moment,” Ted said. “I think I went one rootbeer over my limit. My holding-tanks seem to have shrunk with age.”

He shuffled into the bathroom. There was an interminable pause, and then the sound of pee splashing into the bowl. “Aaah!” Ted said. There was considerable satisfaction in his voice.

Bobby could no longer sit. He got up and began pacing around the living room. He was sure that Tommy “Hurricane” Haywood was right now being photographed in his corner at The Garden, bruised but beaming as the flashbulbs splashed white light over his face. The Gillette Blue Blades Girl would be there with him, her arm around his shoulders, his hand around her waist as Eddie Albini slumped forgotten in his own corner, dazed eyes puffed almost shut, still not completely conscious from the pounding he had taken.

By the time Ted returned, Bobby was in despair. He knew that Albini had lost the fight and his friend had lost his five hundred dol-lars. Would Ted stay when he found out he was broke? He might . . . but if he did and the low men came . . .

Bobby watched, fists clenching and unclenching, as Ted picked up the telephone and dialed.

“Relax, Bobby,” Ted told him. “It’s going to be okay.”

But Bobby couldn’t relax. His guts felt full of wires. Ted held the phone to his ear without saying anything for what seemed like forever.

“Why don’t they answer?” Bobby whispered fiercely.

“It’s only rung twice, Bobby. Why don’t you—hello? This is Mr. Brautigan calling. Ted Brautigan? Yes, ma’am, from this afternoon.” Incredibly, Ted tipped Bobby a wink. How could he be so cool? Bobby didn’t think he himself would have been capable of holding the phone up to his ear if he’d been in Ted’s position, let alone wink-ing. “Yes, ma’am, he is.” Ted turned to Bobby and said, without cov-ering the mouthpiece of the phone, “Alanna wants to know how is your girlfriend.”

Bobby tried to speak and could only wheeze.

“Bobby says she’s fine,” Ted told Alanna, “pretty as a summer day. May I speak to Len? Yes, I can wait. But please tell me about the fight.” There was a pause which seemed to go on forever. Ted was expressionless now. And this time when he turned to Bobby he cov-ered the mouthpiece. “She says Albini got knocked around pretty good in the first five, held his own in six and seven, then threw a right hook out of nowhere and put Haywood on the canvas in the eighth. Lights out for the Hurricane. What a surprise, eh?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. His lips felt numb. It was true, all of it. By this time Friday night Ted would be gone. With two thousand rocks in your pocket you could do a lot of running from a lot of low men; with two thousand rocks in your pocket you could ride the Big Gray Dog from sea to shining sea.

Bobby went into the bathroom and squirted Ipana on his tooth-brush. His terror that Ted had bet on the wrong fighter was gone, but the sadness of approaching loss was still there, and still growing. He never would have guessed that something that hadn’t even hap-pened could hurt so much. A week from now I won’t remember what was so neat about him. A year from now I’ll hardly remember him at all.

Was that true? God, was that true?

No, Bobby thought. No way. I won’t let it be.

In the other room Ted was conversing with Len Files. It seemed to be a friendly enough palaver, going just as Ted had expected it would . . . and yes, here was Ted saying he’d just played a hunch, a good strong one, the kind you had to bet if you wanted to think of yourself as a sport. Sure, nine-thirty tomorrow night would be fine for the payout, assuming his friend’s mother was back by eight; if she was a little late, Len would see him around ten or ten-thirty. Did that suit? More laughter from Ted, so it seemed that it suited fat Lennie Files right down to the ground.

Bobby put his toothbrush back in the glass on the shelf below the mirror, then reached into his pants pocket. There was something in there his fingers didn’t recognize, not a part of the usual pocket-litter. He pulled out the keyring with the green fob, his special sou-venir of a part of Bridgeport his mother knew nothing about. The part that was down there. THE CORNER POCKET BILLIARDS, POOL, AUTO. GAMES. KENMORE 8-2127.

He probably should have hidden it already (or gotten rid of it entirely), and suddenly an idea came to him. Nothing could have really cheered Bobby Garfield up that night, but this at least came close: he would give the keyring to Carol Gerber, after cautioning her never to tell his mom where she’d gotten it. He knew that Carol had at least two keys she could put on it—her apartment key and the key to the diary Rionda had given her for her birthday. (Carol was three months older than Bobby, but she never lorded it over him on this account.) Giving her the keyring would be a little like asking her to go steady. He wouldn’t have to get all gushy and embarrass himself by saying so, either; Carol would know. It was part of what made her cool.

Bobby laid the keyring on the shelf, next to the toothglass, then went into his bedroom to put on his pj’s. When he came out, Ted was sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette and looking at him.

“Bobby, are you all right?”

“I guess so. I guess I have to be, don’t I?”

Ted nodded. “I guess we both have to be.”

“Will I ever see you again?” Bobby asked, pleading in his mind for Ted not to sound like the Lone Ranger, not to start talking any of that corny we’ll meet again pard stuff . . . because it wasn’t stuff, that word was too kind. Shit was what it was. He didn’t think Ted had ever lied to him, and he didn’t want him to start now that they were near the end.

“I don’t know.” Ted studied the coal of his cigarette, and when he looked up, Bobby saw that his eyes were swimming with tears. “I don’t think so.”

Those tears undid Bobby. He ran across the room, wanting to hug Ted, needing to hug him. He stopped when Ted lifted his arms and crossed them over the chest of his baggy old man’s shirt, his expres-sion a kind of horrified surprise.

Bobby stood where he was, his arms still held out to hug. Slowly he lowered them. No hugging, no touching. It was the rule, but the rule was mean. The rule was wrong.

“Will you write?” he asked.

“I will send you postcards,” Ted replied after a moment’s thought. “Not directly to you, though—that might be dangerous for both of us. What shall I do? Any ideas?”

“Send them to Carol,” Bobby said. He didn’t even stop to think.

“When did you tell her about the low men, Bobby?” There was no reproach in Ted’s voice. Why would there be? He was going, wasn’t he? For all the difference it made, the guy who did the story on the shopping-cart thief could write it up for the paper: CRAZY OLD MAN RUNS FROM INVADING ALIENS. People would read it to each other over their coffee and breakfast cereal and laugh. What had Ted called it that day? Galumphing small-town humor, hadn’t that been it? But if it was so funny, why did it hurt? Why did it hurt so much?

“Today,” he said in a small voice. “I saw her in the park and every-thing just kind of . . . came out.”

“That can happen,” Ted said gravely. “I know it well; sometimes the dam just bursts. And perhaps it’s for the best. You’ll tell her I may want to get in touch with you through her?”

“Yeah.”

Ted tapped a finger against his lips, thinking. T hen he nodded. “At the top, the cards I send will say Dear C. instead of Dear Carol. At the bottom I’ll sign A Friend. That way you’ll both know who writes. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Cool.” It wasn’t cool, none of this was cool, but it would do.

He suddenly lifted his hand, kissed the fingers, and blew across them. Ted, sitting on the couch, smiled, caught the kiss, and put it on his lined cheek. “You better go to bed now, Bobby. It’s been a big day and it’s late.”

Bobby went to bed.

At first he thought it was the same dream as before—Biderman, Cushman, and Dean chasing his mom through the jungle of William Golding’s island. Then Bobby realized the trees and vines were part of the wallpaper, and that the path under his mother’s flying feet was brown carpet. Not a jungle but a hotel corridor. This was his mind’s version of the Warwick Hotel.

Mr. Biderman and the other two nimrods were still chasing her, though. And now so were the boys from St. Gabe’s—Willie and Richie and Harry Doolin. All of them were wearing those streaks of red and white paint on their faces. And all of them were wearing bright yellow doublets upon which was drawn a brilliant red eye: Other than the doublets they were naked. Their privates flopped and bobbed in bushy nests of pubic hair. All save Harry Doolin bran-dished spears; he had his baseball bat. It had been sharpened to a point on both ends.

“Kill the bitch!” Cushman yelled.

“Drink her blood!” Don Biderman cried, and threw his spear at Liz Garfield just as she darted around a corner. The spear stuck, quiv-ering, into one of the jungle-painted walls.

“Stick it up her dirty cunt!” cried Willie—Willie who could be nice when he wasn’t with his friends. The red eye on his chest stared. Below it, his penis also seemed to stare.

Run, Mom! Bobby tried to scream, but no words came out. He had no mouth, no body. He was here and yet he wasn’t. He flew beside his mother like her own shadow. He heard her gasping for breath, saw her trembling, terrified mouth and her torn stockings. Her fancy dress was also torn. One of her breasts was scratched and bleeding. One of her eyes was almost closed. She looked as if she had gone a few rounds with Eddie Albini or Hurricane Haywood . . . maybe both at the same time.

“Gonna split you open!” Richie hollered.

“Eat you alive!” agreed Curtis Dean (and at top volume). “Drink your blood, strew your guts!”

His mom looked back at them and her feet (she had lost her shoes somewhere) stuttered against each other. Don’t do that, Mom, Bobby moaned. For cripe’s sake don’t do that.

As if she had heard him, Liz faced forward again and tried to run faster. She passed a poster on the wall:

PLEASE HELP US FIND OUR PET PIG?

LIZ is our MASCOT!

LIZ IS 34 YRS. OLD!

She is a BAD-TEMPERED SOW but WE LOVE HER!

Will do what you want if you say “I PROMISE”(OR)

“THERE’S MONEY IN IT”

!CALL HOusitonic 5-8337

(OR)BRING to THE WILLIAM PENN GRILLE!

Ask for THE LOW MEN IN THE YELLOW COATS!

Motto: “WE EAT IT RARE!”

His mom saw the poster, too, and this time when her ankles banged together she did fall.

Get up, Mom! Bobby screamed, but she didn’t—perhaps could-n’t. She crawled along the brown carpet instead, looking over her shoulder as she went, her hair hanging across her cheeks and fore-head in sweaty clumps. The back of her dress had been torn away, and Bobby could see her bare bum—her underpants were gone. Worse, the backs of her thighs were splashed with blood. What had they done to her? Dear God, what had they done to his mother?

Don Biderman came around the corner ahead of her—he had found a shortcut and cut her off. The others were right behind him. Now Mr. Biderman’s prick was standing straight up the way Bobby’s sometimes did in the morning before he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Only Mr. Biderman’s prick was huge, it looked like a kraken, a triffid, a monstah, and Bobby thought he understood the blood on his mother’s legs. He didn’t want to but he thought he did.

Leave her alone! he tried to scream at Mr. Biderman. Leave her alone, haven’t you done enough?

The scarlet eye on Mr. Biderman’s yellow doublet suddenly opened wider . . . and slithered to one side. Bobby was invisible, his body one world farther down the spinning top from this one . . . but the red eye saw him. The red eye saw everything.

“Kill the pig, drink her blood,” Mr. Biderman said in a thick, almost unrecognizable voice, and started forward.

“Kill the pig, drink her blood,” Bill Cushman and Curtis Dean chimed in.

“Kill the pig, strew her guts, eat her flesh,” chanted Willie and Richie, falling in behind the nimrods. Like those of the men, their pricks had turned into spears.

“Eat her, drink her, strew her, screw her,” Harry chimed in.

Get up, Mom! Run! Don’t let them!

She tried. But even as she struggled from her knees to her feet, Biderman leaped at her. The others followed, closing in, and as their hands began to tear the tatters of her clothes from her body Bobby thought: I want to get out of here, I want to go back down the top to my own world, make it stop and spin it the other way so I can go back down to my own room in my own world . . .

Except it wasn’t a top, and even as the images of the dream began to break up and go dark, Bobby knew it. It wasn’t a top but a tower, a still spindle upon which all of existence moved and spun. Then it was gone and for a little while there was a merciful nothingness. When he opened his eyes, his bedroom was full of sunshine—sum-mer sunshine on a Thursday morning in the last June of the Eisen-hower Presidency.

IX. UGLY THURSDAY.

One thing you could say about Ted Brautigan: he knew how to cook. The breakfast he slid in front of Bobby—lightly scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon—was a lot better than anything his mother ever made for breakfast (her specialty was huge, tasteless pancakes which the two of them drowned in Aunt Jemima’s syrup), and as good as anything you could get at the Colony Diner or the Harwich. The only problem was that Bobby didn’t feel like eating. He couldn’t remember the details of his dream, but he knew it had been a night-mare, and that he must have cried at some point while it was going on—when he woke up, his pillow had been damp. Yet the dream wasn’t the only reason he felt flat and depressed this morning; dreams, after all, weren’t real. Ted’s going away would be real. And would be forever.

“Are you leaving right from The Corner Pocket?” Bobby asked as Ted sat down across from him with his own plate of eggs and bacon. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that will be safest.” He began to eat, but slowly and with no apparent enjoyment. So he was feeling bad, too. Bobby was glad. “I’ll say to your mother that my brother in Illinois is ill. That’s all she needs to know.”

“Are you going to take the Big Gray Dog?”

Ted smiled briefly. “Probably the train. I’m quite the wealthy man, remember.”

“Which train?”

“It’s better if you don’t know the details, Bobby. What you don’t know you can’t tell. Or be made to tell.”

Bobby considered this briefly, then asked, “You’ll remember the postcards?”

Ted picked up a piece of bacon, then put it down again. “Post-cards, plenty of postcards. I promise. Now don’t let’s talk about it anymore.”

“What should we talk about, then?”

Ted thought about it, then smiled. His smile was sweet and open; when he smiled, Bobby could see what he must have looked like when he was twenty, and strong.

“Books, of course,” Ted said. “We’ll talk about books.”

It was going to be a crushingly hot day, that was clear by nine o’clock. Bobby helped with the dishes, drying and putting away, and then they sat in the living room, where Ted’s fan did its best to circu-late the already tired air, and they talked about books . . . or rather Ted talked about books. And this morning, without the distraction of the Albini–Haywood fight, Bobby listened hungrily. He didn’t understand all of what Ted was saying, but he understood enough to realize that books made their own world, and that the Harwich Pub-lic Library wasn’t it. The library was nothing but the doorway to that world.

Ted talked of William Golding and what he called “dystopian fan-tasy,” went on to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, suggesting a link between the Morlocks and the Eloi and Jack and Ralph on Golding’s island; he talked about what he called “literature’s only excuses,” which he said were exploring the questions of innocence and experi-ence, good and evil. Near the end of this impromptu lecture he men-tioned a novel called The Exorcist, which dealt with both these questions (“in the popular context”), and then stopped abruptly. He shook his head as if to clear it.

“What’s wrong?” Bobby took a sip of his rootbeer. He still didn’t like it much but it was the only soft drink in the fridge. Besides, it was cold.

“What am I thinking?” Ted passed a hand over his brow, as if he’d suddenly developed a headache. “That one hasn’t been written yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I’m rambling. Why don’t you go out for awhile? Stretch your legs? I might lie down for a bit. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

“Okay.” Bobby guessed a little fresh air—even if it was hot fresh air—might do him good. And while it was interesting to listen to Ted talk, he had started to feel as if the apartment walls were closing in on him. It was knowing Ted was going, Bobby supposed. Now there was a sad little rhyme for you: knowing he was going.

For a moment, as he went back into his room to get his baseball glove, the keyring from The Corner Pocket crossed his mind—he was going to give it to Carol so she’d know they were going steady. Then he remembered Harry Doolin, Richie O’Meara, and Willie Shearman. They were out there someplace, sure they were, and if they caught him by himself they’d probably beat the crap out of him. For the first time in two or three days, Bobby found himself wishing for Sully. Sully was a little kid like him, but he was tough. Doolin and his friends might beat him up, but Sully-John would make them pay for the privilege. S-J was at camp, though, and that was that.

Bobby never considered staying in—he couldn’t hide all summer from the likes of Willie Shearman, that would be buggy—but as he went outside he reminded himself that he had to be careful, had to be on the lookout for them. As long as he saw them coming, there would be no problem.

With the St. Gabe’s boys on his mind, Bobby left 149 with no fur-ther thought of the keyfob, his special souvenir of down there. It lay on the bathroom shelf next to the toothglass, right where he had left it the night before.

***

He tramped all over Harwich, it seemed—from Broad Street to Commonwealth Park (no St. Gabe’s boys on Field C today; the American Legion team was there, taking batting practice and shag-ging flies in the hot sun), from the park to the town square, from the town square to the railway station. As he stood in the little news-stand kiosk beneath the railway overpass, looking at paperbacks (Mr. Burton, who ran the place, would let you look for awhile as long as you didn’t handle what he called “the moichandise”), the town whis-tle went off, startling them both. “Mothera God, what’s up widdat?” Mr. Burton asked indignantly. He had spilled packs of gum all over the floor and now stooped to pick them up, his gray change-apron hanging down. “It ain’t but quarter past eleven!” “It’s early, all right,” Bobby agreed, and left the newsstand soon after. Browsing had lost its charms for him. He walked out to River Avenue, stopping at the Tip-Top Bakery to buy half a loaf of day-old bread (two cents) and to ask Georgie Sullivan how S-J was. “He’s fine,” S-J’s oldest brother said. “We got a postcard on Tues-day says he misses the fambly and wantsa come home. We get one Wednesday says he’s learning how to dive. The one this morning says he’s having the time of his life, he wantsa stay forever.” He laughed, a big Irish boy of twenty with big Irish arms and shoulders. “He may wanta stay forever, but Ma’d miss im like hell if he stayed up there. You gonna feed the ducks with some of that?” “Yeah, like always.” “Don’t let em nibble your fingers. Those damned river ducks carry diseases. They—”

In the town square the Municipal Building clock began to chime noon, although it was still only quarter of.

“What’s going on today?” Georgie asked. “First the whistle blows early, now the damned town clock’s off-course.”

“Maybe it’s the heat,” Bobby said.

Georgie looked at Bobby doubtfully. “Well . . . it’s as good an explanation as any.”

Yeah, Bobby thought, going out. And quite a bit safer than some.

***

Bobby went down River Avenue, munching his bread as he walked. By the time he found a bench near the Housatonic River, most of the half-loaf had disappeared down his own throat. Ducks came waddling eagerly out of the reeds and Bobby began to scatter the remaining bread for them, amused as always by the greedy way they ran for the chunks and the way they threw their heads back to eat them.

After awhile he began to grow drowsy. He looked out over the river, at the nets of reflected light shimmering on its surface, and grew drowsier still. He had slept the previous night but his sleep hadn’t been restful. Now he dozed off with his hands full of bread-crumbs. The ducks finished with what was on the grass and then drew closer to him, quacking in low, ruminative tones. The clock in the town square bonged the hour of two at twelve-twenty, causing people downtown to shake their heads and ask each other what the world was coming to. Bobby’s doze deepened by degrees, and when a shadow fell over him, he didn’t see or sense it.

“Hey. Kid.”

The voice was quiet and intense. Bobby sat up with a gasp and a jerk, his hands opening and spilling out the remaining bread. Those snakes began to crawl around in his belly again. It wasn’t Willie Shearman or Richie O’Meara or Harry Doolin—even coming out of a doze he knew that—but Bobby almost wished it had been one of them. Even all three. A beating wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to you. No, not the worst. Cripes, why did he have to go and fall asleep?

“Kid.”

The ducks were stepping on Bobby’s feet, squabbling over the unexpected windfall. Their wings were fluttering against his ankles and his shins, but the feeling was far away, far away. He could see the shadow of a man’s head on the grass ahead of him. The man was standing behind him.

“Kid.”

Slowly and creakily, Bobby turned. The man’s coat would be yel-low and somewhere on it would be an eye, a staring red eye.

But the man who stood there was wearing a tan summer suit, the jacket pooched out by a little stomach that was starting to grow into a big stomach, and Bobby knew at once it wasn’t one of them, after all. There was no itching behind his eyes, no black threads across his field of vision . . . but the major thing was that this wasn’t some crea-ture just pretending to be a person; it was a person.

“What?” Bobby asked, his voice low and muzzy. He still couldn’t believe he’d gone to sleep like that, blanked out like that. “What do you want?”

“I’ll give you two bucks to let me blow you,” the man in the tan suit said. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out his wallet. “We can go behind that tree over there. No one’ll see us. And you’ll like it.”

“No,” Bobby said, getting up. He wasn’t completely sure what the man in the tan suit was talking about, but he had a pretty good idea. The ducks scattered backward, but the bread was too tempting to resist and they returned, pecking and dancing around Bobby’s sneakers. “I have to go home now. My mother—”

The man came closer, still holding out his wallet. It was as if he’d decided to give the whole thing to Bobby, never mind the two lousy dollars. “You don’t have to do it to me, I’ll just do it to you. Come on, what do you say? I’ll make it three dollars.” The man’s voice was trembling now, jigging and jagging up and down the scale, at one moment seeming to laugh, at the next almost to weep. “You can go to the movies for a month on three dollars.”

“No, really, I—”

“You’ll like it, all my boys like it.” He reached out for Bobby and suddenly Bobby thought of Ted taking hold of his shoulders, Ted putting his hands behind his neck, Ted pulling him closer until they were almost close enough to kiss. That wasn’t like this . . . and yet it was. Somehow it was.

Without thinking about what he was doing, Bobby bent and grabbed one of the ducks. He lifted it in a surprised squawking flurry of beak and wings and paddling feet, had just a glimpse of one black bead of an eye, and then threw it at the man in the tan suit. The man yelled and put his hands up to shield his face, dropping his wallet.

Bobby ran.

He was passing through the square, headed back home, when he saw a poster on a telephone pole outside the candy store. He walked over to it and read it with silent horror. He couldn’t remember his dream of the night before, but something like this had been in it. He was positive.

HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN!He is an OLD MONGREL but WE LOVE HIM!BRAUTIGAN has WHITE FUR and BLUE EYES!He is FRIENDLY!Will EAT SCRAPS FROM YOUR HAND!We will pay A VERY LARGE REWARD($ $ $ $)IF YOU HAVE SEEN BRAUTIGAN!CALL HOusitonic 5-8337!(OR)BRING BRAUTIGAN to 745 Highgate Avenue!Home of the SAGAMORE FAMILY!

This isn’t a good day, Bobby thought, watching his hand reach out and pull the poster off the telephone pole. Beyond it, hanging from a bulb on the marquee of the Harwich Theater, he saw a dan-gling blue kite tail. This isn’t a good day at all. I never should have gone out of the apartment. In fact, I should have stayed in bed.

HOusitonic 5-8337, just like on the poster about Phil the Welsh Corgi . . . except if there was a HOusitonic exchange in Harwich, Bobby had never heard of it. Some of the numbers were on the HAr-wich exchange. Others were COmmonwealth. But HOusitonic? No. Not here, not in Bridgeport, either.

He crumpled the poster up and threw it in the KEEP OUR TOWN CLEAN N GREEN basket on the corner, but on the other side of the street he found another just like it. Farther along he found a third pasted to a corner mailbox. He tore these down, as well. The low men were either closing in or desperate. Maybe both. Ted couldn’t go out at all today—Bobby would have to tell him that. And he’d have to be ready to run. He’d tell him that, too.

Bobby cut through the park, almost running himself in his hurry to get home, and he barely heard the small, gasping cry which came from his left as he passed the baseball fields: “Bobby . . .”

He stopped and looked toward the grove of trees where Carol had taken him the day before when he started to bawl. And when the gasping cry came again, he realized it was her.

“Bobby if it’s you please help me . . .”

He turned off the cement path and ducked into the copse of trees. What he saw there made him drop his baseball glove on the ground. It was an Alvin Dark model, that glove, and later it was gone. Some-one came along and just kifed it, he supposed, and so what? As that day wore on, his lousy baseball glove was the very least of his concerns.

Carol sat beneath the same elm tree where she had comforted him. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Her face was ashy gray. Black shock-circles ringed her eyes, giving her a raccoony look. A thread of blood trickled from one of her nostrils. Her left arm lay across her midriff, pulling her shirt tight against the beginning nubs of what would be breasts in another year or two. She held the elbow of that arm cupped in her right hand.

She was wearing shorts and a smock-type blouse with long sleeves— the kind of thing you just slipped on over your head. Later, Bobby would lay much of the blame for what happened on that stupid shirt of hers. She must have worn it to protect against sunburn; it was the only reason he could think of to wear long sleeves on such a mur-derously hot day. Had she picked it out herself or had Mrs. Gerber forced her into it? And did it matter? Yes, Bobby would think when there was time to think. It mattered, you’re damned right it mattered.

But for now the blouse with its long sleeves was peripheral. The only thing he noticed in that first instant was Carol’s upper left arm. It seemed to have not one shoulder but two.

“Bobby,” she said, looking at him with shining dazed eyes. “They hurt me.”

She was in shock, of course. He was in shock himself by then, run-ning on instinct. He tried to pick her up and she screamed in pain— dear God, what a sound.

“I’ll run and get help,” he said, lowering her back. “You just sit there and try not to move.”

She was shaking her head—carefully, so as not to joggle her arm. Her blue eyes were nearly black with pain and terror. “No, Bobby, no, don’t leave me here, what if they come back? What if they come back and hurt me worse?” Parts of what happened on that long hot Thursday were lost to him, lost in the shockwave, but that part always stood clear: Carol looking up at him and saying What if they come back and hurt me worse?

“But . . . Carol . . .”

“I can walk. If you help me, I can walk.”

Bobby put a tentative arm around her waist, hoping she wouldn’t scream again. That had been bad.

Carol got slowly to her feet, using the trunk of the tree to support her back. Her left arm moved a little as she rose. That grotesque dou-ble shoulder bulged and flexed. She moaned but didn’t scream, thank God.

“You better stop,” Bobby said.

“No, I want to get out of here. Help me. Oh God, it hurts.”

Once she was all the way up it seemed a little better. They made their way out of the grove with the slow side-by-side solemnity of a couple about to be married. Beyond the shade of the trees the day seemed even hotter than before and blindingly bright. Bobby looked around and saw no one. Somewhere, deeper in the park, a bunch of little kids (probably Sparrows or Robins from Sterling House) were singing a song, but the area around the baseball fields was utterly deserted: no kids, no mothers wheeling baby carriages, no sign of Officer Raymer, the local cop who would sometimes buy you an ice cream or a bag of peanuts if he was in a good mood. Everyone was inside, hiding from the heat.

Still moving slowly, Bobby with his arm around Carol’s waist, they walked along the path which came out on the corner of Common-wealth and Broad. Broad Street Hill was as deserted as the park; the paving shimmered like the air over an incinerator. There wasn’t a sin-gle pedestrian or moving car in sight.

They stepped onto the sidewalk and Bobby was about to ask if she could make it across the street when Carol said in a high, whispery voice: “Oh Bobby I’m fainting.”

He looked at her in alarm and saw her eyes roll up to glistening whites. She swayed back and forth like a tree which has been cut almost all the way through. Bobby bent, moving without thinking, catching her around the thighs and the back as her knees unlocked. He had been standing to her right and was able to do this without hurting her left arm any more than it already had been hurt; also, even in her faint, Carol kept her right hand cupped over her left elbow, holding the arm mostly steady.

Carol Gerber was Bobby’s height, perhaps even a little taller, and close to his weight. He should have been incapable of even staggering up Broad Street with her in his arms, but people in shock are capable of amazing bursts of strength. Bobby carried her, and not at a stagger; under that burning June sun he ran. No one stopped him, no one asked him what was wrong with the little girl, no one offered to help. He could hear cars on Asher Avenue, but this part of the world seemed eerily like Midwich, where everyone had gone to sleep at once.

Taking Carol to her mother never crossed his mind. T he Gerber apartment was farther up the hill, but that wasn’t the reason. Ted was all Bobby could think of. He had to take her to Ted. Ted would know what to do.

His preternatural strength began to give out as he climbed the steps to the front porch of his building. He staggered, and Carol’s grotesque double shoulder bumped against the railing. She stiffened in his arms and cried out, her half-lidded eyes opening wide.

“Almost there,” he told her in a panting whisper that didn’t sound much like his own voice. “Almost there, I’m sorry I bumped you but we’re almost—”

The door opened and Ted came out. He was wearing gray suit pants and a strap-style undershirt. Suspenders hung down to his knees in swinging loops. He looked surprised and concerned but not frightened.

Bobby managed the last porch step and then swayed backward. For one terrible moment he thought he was going to go crashing down, maybe splitting his skull on the cement walk. Then Ted grabbed him and steadied him.

“Give her to me,” he said.

“Get over on her other side first,” Bobby panted. His arms were twanging like guitar strings and his shoulders seemed to be on fire. “That’s the bad side.”

Ted came around and stood next to Bobby. Carol was looking up at them, her sandy-blond hair hanging down over Bobby’s wrist. “They hurt me,” she whispered to Ted. “Willie . . . I asked him to make them stop but he wouldn’t.”

“Don’t talk,” Ted said. “You’re going to be all right.”

He took her from Bobby as gently as he could, but they couldn’t help joggling her left arm a little. The double shoulder moved under the white smock. Carol moaned, then began to cry. Fresh blood trick-led from her right nostril, one brilliant red drop against her skin. Bobby had a momentary flash from his dream of the night before: the eye. The red eye.

“Hold the door for me, Bobby.”

Bobby held it wide. Ted carried Carol through the foyer and into the Garfield apartment. At that same moment Liz Garfield was descending the iron steps leading from the Harwich stop of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad to Main Street, where there was a taxi stand. She moved with the slow deliberation of a chronic invalid. A suitcase dangled from each hand. Mr. Burton, proprietor of the newsstand kiosk, happened to be standing in his doorway and having a smoke. He watched Liz reach the bottom of the steps, turn back the veil of her little hat, and gingerly dab at her face with a bit of handkerchief. She winced at each touch. She was wearing makeup, a lot, but the makeup didn’t help. The makeup only drew attention to what had happened to her. The veil was better, even though it only covered the upper part of her face, and now she lowered it again. She approached the first of three idling taxis, and the driver got out to help her with her bags.

Burton wondered who had given her the business. He hoped who-ever it had been was currently getting his head massaged by big cops with hard hickories. A person who would do something like that to a woman deserved no better. A person who would do something like that to a woman had no business running around loose. That was Burton’s opinion.

Bobby thought Ted would put Carol on the couch, but he didn’t. There was one straight-backed chair in the living room and that was where he sat, holding her on his lap. He held her the way the Grant’s department store Santa Claus held the little kids who came up to him as he sat on his throne.

“Where else are you hurt? Besides the shoulder?”

“They hit me in the stomach. And on my side.”

“Which side?”

“The right one.”

Ted gently pulled her blouse up on that side. Bobby hissed in air over his lower lip when he saw the bruise which lay diagonally across her ribcage. He recognized the baseball-bat shape of it at once. He knew whose bat it had been: Harry Doolin’s, the pimply galoot who saw himself as Robin Hood in whatever stunted landscape passed for his imagination. He and Richie O’Meara and Willie Shearman had come upon her in the park and Harry had worked her over with his ball-bat while Richie and Willie held her. All three of them laughing and calling her the Gerber Baby. Maybe it had started as a joke and gotten out of hand. Wasn’t that pretty much what had happened in Lord of the Flies? Things had just gotten a little out of hand?

Ted touched Carol’s waist; his bunchy fingers spread and then slowly slid up her side. He did this with his head cocked, as if he were listening rather than touching. Maybe he was. Carol gasped when he reached the bruise.

“Hurt?” Ted asked.

“A little. Not as bad as my sh-shoulder. They broke my arm, didn’t they?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Ted replied.

“I heard it pop. So did they. That’s when they ran.”

“I’m sure you did hear it. Yes indeed.”

Tears were running down her cheeks and her face was still ashy, but Carol seemed calmer now. Ted held her blouse up against her armpit and looked at the bruise. He knows what that shape is just as well as I do, Bobby thought.

“How many were there, Carol?”

Three, Bobby thought.

“Th-three.”

“Three boys?”

She nodded.

“Three boys against one little girl. They must have been afraid of you. They must have thought you were a lion. Are you a lion, Carol?”

“I wish I was,” Carol said. She tried to smile. “I wish I could have roared and made them go away. They h-h-hurt me.”

“I know they did. I know.” His hand slid down her side and cupped the bat-bruise on her ribcage. “Breathe in.”

The bruise swelled against Ted’s hand; Bobby could see its purple shape between his nicotine-stained fingers. “Does that hurt?”

She shook her head.

“Not to breathe?”

“No.”

“And not when your ribs go against my hand?”

“No. Only sore. What hurts is . . .” She glanced quickly at the ter-rible shape of her double shoulder, then away.

“I know. Poor Carol. Poor darling. We’ll get to that. Where else did they hit you? In the stomach, you said?”

“Yes.”

Ted pulled her blouse up in front. T here was another bruise, but this one didn’t look so deep or so angry. He prodded gently with his fingers, first above her bellybutton and then below it. She said there was no pain like in her shoulder, that her belly was only sore like her ribs were sore.

“They didn’t hit you in your back?”

“N-no.”

“In your head or your neck?”

“Uh-uh, just my side and my stomach and then they hit me in the shoulder and there was that pop and they heard it and they ran. I used to think Willie Shearman was nice.” She gave Ted a woeful look.

“Turn your head for me, Carol . . . good . . . now the other way. It doesn’t hurt when you turn it?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure they never hit your head.”

“No. I mean yes, I’m sure.”

“Lucky girl.”

Bobby wondered how in the hell Ted could think Carol was lucky. Her left arm didn’t look just broken to him; it looked half torn off. He suddenly thought of a roast-chicken Sunday dinner, and the sound the drumstick made when you pulled it loose. His stomach knotted. For a moment he thought he was going to vomit up his breakfast and the day-old bread which had been his only lunch.

No, he told himself. Not now, you can’t. Ted’s got enough prob-lems without adding you to the list.

“Bobby?” Ted’s voice was clear and sharp. He sounded like a guy with more solutions than problems, and what a relief that was. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” And he thought it was true. His stomach was starting to settle.

“Good. You did well to get her up here. Can you do well a little longer?”

“Yeah.”

“I need a pair of scissors. Can you find one?”

Bobby went into his mother’s bedroom, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and got out her wicker sewing basket. Inside was a medium-sized pair of shears. He hurried back into the living room with them and showed them to Ted. “Are these all right?”

“Fine,” he said, taking them. Then, to Carol: “I’m going to spoil your blouse, Carol. I’m sorry, but I have to look at your shoulder now and I don’t want to hurt you any more than I can help.”

“That’s okay,” she said, and again tried to smile. Bobby was a little in awe of her bravery; if his shoulder had looked like that, he proba-bly would have been blatting like a sheep caught in a barbed-wire fence.

“You can wear one of Bobby’s shirts home. Can’t she, Bobby?”

“Sure, I don’t mind a few cooties.”

“Fun-nee,” Carol said.

Working carefully, Ted cut the smock up the back and then up the front. With that done he pulled the two pieces off like the shell of an egg. He was very careful on the left side, but Carol uttered a hoarse scream when Ted’s fingers brushed her shoulder. Bobby jumped and his heart, which had been slowing down, began to race again.

“I’m sorry,” Ted murmured. “Oh my. Look at this.”

Carol’s shoulder was ugly, but not as bad as Bobby had feared— perhaps few things were once you were looking right at them. The second shoulder was higher than the normal one, and the skin there was stretched so tight that Bobby didn’t understand why it didn’t just split open. It had gone a peculiar lilac color, as well.

“How bad is it?” Carol asked. She was looking in the other direc-tion, across the room. Her small face had the pinched, starved look of a UNICEF child. So far as Bobby knew she never looked at her hurt shoulder after that single quick peek. “I’ll be in a cast all summer, won’t I?”

“I don’t think you’re going to be in a cast at all.”

Carol looked up into Ted’s face wonderingly.

“It’s not broken, child, only dislocated. Someone hit you on the shoulder—”

“Harry Doolin—”

“—and hard enough to knock the top of the bone in your upper left arm out of its socket. I can put it back in, I think. Can you stand one or two moments of quite bad pain if you know things may be all right again afterward?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “Fix it, Mr. Brautigan. Please fix it.”

Bobby looked at him a little doubtfully. “Can you really do that?”

“Yes. Give me your belt.”

“Huh?”

“Your belt. Give it to me.”

Bobby slipped his belt—a fairly new one he’d gotten for Christ-mas—out of its loops and handed it to Ted, who took it without ever shifting his eyes from Carol’s. “What’s your last name, honey?”

“Gerber. They called me the Gerber Baby, but I’m not a baby.”

“I’m sure you’re not. And this is where you prove it.” He got up, settled her in the chair, then knelt before her like a guy in some old movie getting ready to propose. He folded Bobby’s belt over twice in his big hands, then poked it at her good hand until she let go of her elbow and closed her fingers over the loops. “Good. Now put it in your mouth.”

“Put Bobby’s belt in my mouth?”

Ted’s gaze never left her. He began stroking her unhurt arm from the elbow to the wrist. His fingers trailed down her forearm . . . stopped . . . rose and went back to her elbow . . . trailed down her forearm again. It’s like he’s hypnotizing her, Bobby thought, but there was really no “like” about it; Ted was hypnotizing her. His pupils had begun to do that weird thing again, growing and shrink-ing . . . growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking. Their movement and the movement of his fingers were exactly in rhythm. Carol stared into his face, her lips parted.

“Ted . . . your eyes . . .”

“Yes, yes.” He sounded impatient, not very interested in what his eyes were doing. “Pain rises, Carol, did you know that?”

“No . . .”

Her eyes on his. His fingers on her arm, going down and rising. Going down . . . and rising. His pupils like a slow heartbeat. Bobby could see Carol relaxing in the chair. She was still holding the belt, and when Ted stopped his finger-stroking long enough to touch the back of her hand, she lifted it toward her face with no protest.

“Oh yes,” he said, “pain rises from its source to the brain. When I put your shoulder back in its socket, there will be a lot of pain—but you’ll catch most of it in your mouth as it rises toward your brain. You will bite it with your teeth and hold it against Bobby’s belt so that only a little of it can get into your head, which is where things hurt the most. Do you understand me, Carol?”

“Yes . . .” Her voice had grown distant. She looked very small sit-ting there in the straight-backed chair, wearing only her shorts and her sneakers. The pupils of Ted’s eyes, Bobby noticed, had grown steady again.

“Put the belt in your mouth.”

She put it between her lips.

“Bite when it hurts.”

“When it hurts.”

“Catch the pain.”

“I’ll catch it.”

Ted gave a final stroke of his big forefinger from her elbow to her wrist, then looked at Bobby. “Wish me luck,” he said.

“Luck,” Bobby replied fervently.

Distant, dreaming, Carol Gerber said: “Bobby threw a duck at a man.”

“Did he?” Ted asked. Very, very gently he closed his left hand around Carol’s left wrist.

“Bobby thought the man was a low man.”

Ted glanced at Bobby.

“Not that kind of low man,” Bobby said. “Just . . . oh, never mind.”

“All the same,” Ted said, “they are very close. T he town clock, the town whistle—”

“I heard,” Bobby said grimly.

“I’m not going to wait until your mother comes back tonight—I don’t dare. I’ll spend the day in a movie or a park or somewhere else. If all else fails, there are flophouses in Bridgeport. Carol, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“When the pain rises, what will you do?”

“Catch it. Bite it into Bobby’s belt.”

“Good girl. Ten seconds and you are going to feel a lot better.”

Ted drew in a deep breath. T hen he reached out with his right hand until it hovered just above the lilac-colored bulge in Carol’s shoulder. “Here comes the pain, darling. Be brave.”

It wasn’t ten seconds; not even five. To Bobby it seemed to happen in an instant. The heel of Ted’s right hand pressed directly against that knob rising out of Carol’s stretched flesh. At the same time he pulled sharply on her wrist. Carol’s jaws flexed as she clamped down on Bobby’s belt. Bobby heard a brief creaking sound, like the one his neck sometimes made when it was stiff and he turned his head. And then the bulge in Carol’s arm was gone.

“Bingo!” Ted cried. “Looks good! Carol?”

She opened her mouth. Bobby’s belt fell out of it and onto her lap. Bobby saw a line of tiny points embedded in the leather; she had bit-ten nearly all the way through.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said wonderingly. She ran her right hand up to where the skin was now turning a darker purple, touched the bruise, winced.

“That’ll be sore for a week or so,” Ted warned her. “And you must-n’t throw or lift with that arm for at least two weeks. If you do, it may pop out again.”

“I’ll be careful.” Now Carol could look at her arm. She kept touch-ing the bruise with light, testing fingers.

“How much of the pain did you catch?” Ted asked her, and although his face was still grave, Bobby thought he could hear a little smile in his voice.

“Most of it,” she said. “It hardly hurt at all.” As soon as these words were out, however, she slumped back in the chair. Her eyes were open but unfocused. Carol had fainted for the second time.

Ted told Bobby to wet a cloth and bring it to him. “Cold water,” he said. “Wring it out, but not too much.”

Bobby ran into the bathroom, got a facecloth from the shelf by the tub, and wet it in cold water. The bottom half of the bathroom win-dow was frosted glass, but if he had looked out the top half he would have seen his mother’s taxi pulling up out front. Bobby didn’t look; he was concentrating on his chore. He never thought of the green keyfob, either, although it was lying on the shelf right in front of his eyes.

When Bobby came back into the living room, Ted was sitting in the straight-backed chair with Carol in his lap again. Bobby noticed how tanned her arms had already become compared to the rest of her skin, which was a pure, smooth white (except for where the bruises stood out). She looks like she’s wearing nylon stockings on her arms, he thought, a little amused. Her eyes had begun to clear and they tracked Bobby when he moved toward her, but Carol still didn’t look exactly great—her hair was mussed, her face was all sweaty, and there was that drying trickle of blood between her nostril and the corner of her mouth.

Ted took the cloth and began to wipe her cheeks and forehead with it. Bobby knelt by the arm of the chair. Carol sat up a little, rais-ing her face gratefully against the cool and the wet. Ted wiped away the blood under her nose, then put the facecloth aside on the end-table. He brushed Carol’s sweaty hair off her brow. When some of it flopped back, he moved his hand to brush it away again.

Before he could, the door to the porch banged open. Footfalls crossed the foyer. The hand on Carol’s damp forehead froze. Bobby’s eyes met Ted’s and a single thought flowed between them, strong telepathy consisting of a single word: Them.

“No,” Carol said, “not them, Bobby, it’s your m—”

The apartment door opened and Liz stood there with her key in one hand and her hat—the one with the veil on it—in the other. Behind her and beyond the foyer the door to all the hot outside world stood open. Side by side on the porch welcome mat were her two suitcases, where the cab driver had put them.

“Bobby, how many times have I told you to lock this damn—”

She got that far, then stopped. In later years Bobby would replay that moment again and again, seeing more and more of what his mother had seen when she came back from her disastrous trip to Providence: her son kneeling by the chair where the old man she had never liked or really trusted sat with the little girl in his lap. The lit-tle girl looked dazed. Her hair was in sweaty clumps. Her blouse had been torn off—it lay in pieces on the floor—and even with her own eyes puffed mostly shut, Liz would have seen Carol’s bruises: one on the shoulder, one on the ribs, one on the stomach.

And Carol and Bobby and Ted Brautigan saw her with that same amazed stop-time clarity: the two black eyes (Liz’s right eye was really nothing but a glitter deep in a puffball of discolored flesh); the lower lip which was swelled and split in two places and still wearing flecks of dried blood like old ugly lipstick; the nose which lay askew and had grown a misbegotten hook, making it almost into a carica-ture Witch Hazel nose.

Silence, a moment’s considering silence on a hot summer after-noon. Somewhere a car backfired. Somewhere a kid shouted “Come on, you guys!” And from behind them on Colony Street came the sound Bobby would identify most strongly with his childhood in general and that Thursday in particular: Mrs. O’Hara’s Bowser bark-ing his way ever deeper into the twentieth century: roop-roop, roop-roop-roop.

Jack got her, Bobby thought. Jack Merridew and his nimrod friends.

“Oh jeez, what happened?” he asked her, breaking the silence. He didn’t want to know; he had to know. He ran to her, starting to cry out of fright but also out of grief: her face, her poor face. She didn’t look like his mom at all. She looked like some old woman who belonged not on shady Broad Street but down there, where people drank wine out of bottles in paper sacks and had no last names. “What did he do? What did that bastard do to you?”

She paid no attention, seemed not to hear him at all. She laid hold of him, though; laid hold of his shoulders hard enough for him to feel her fingers sinking into his flesh, hard enough to hurt. She laid hold and then set him aside without a single look. “Let her go, you filthy man,” she said in a low and rusty voice. “Let her go right now.”

“Mrs. Garfield, please don’t misunderstand.” Ted lifted Carol off his lap—careful even now to keep his hand well away from her hurt shoulder—and then stood up himself. He shook out the legs of his pants, a fussy little gesture that was all Ted. “She was hurt, you see. Bobby found her—”

“BASTARD!” Liz screamed. To her right was a table with a vase on it. She grabbed the vase and threw it at him. Ted ducked, but too slowly to avoid it completely; the bottom of the vase struck the top of his head, skipped like a stone on a pond, hit the wall and shattered.

Carol screamed.

“Mom, no!” Bobby shouted. “He didn’t do anything bad! He didn’t do anything bad!”

Liz took no notice. “How dare you touch her? Have you been touching my son the same way? You have, haven’t you? You don’t care which flavor they are, just as long as they’re young!”

Ted took a step toward her. T he empty loops of his suspenders swung back and forth beside his legs. Bobby could see blooms of blood in the scant hair on top of his head where the vase had clipped him.

“Mrs. Garfield, I assure you—”

“Assure this, you dirty bastard!” With the vase gone, there was nothing left on the table and so she picked up the table itself and threw it. It struck Ted in the chest and drove him backward; would have floored him if not for the straight-backed chair. Ted flopped into it, looking at her with wide, incredulous eyes. His mouth was trem-bling.

“Was he helping you?” Liz asked. Her face was dead white. The bruises on it stood out like birthmarks. “Did you teach my son to help?”

“Mom, he didn’t hurt her!” Bobby shouted. He grabbed her around the waist. “He didn’t hurt her, he—”

She picked him up like the vase, like the table, and he would think later she had been as strong as he had been, carrying Carol up the hill from the park. She threw him across the room. Bobby struck the wall. His head snapped back and connected with the sunburst clock, knocking it to the floor and stopping it forever. Black dots flocked across his vision, making him think briefly and confusedly

(coming closing in now the posters have his name on them)

of the low men. Then he slid to the floor. He tried to stop himself but his knees wouldn’t lock.

Liz looked at him, seemingly without much interest, then back at Ted, who sat in the straight-backed chair with the table in his lap and the legs poking at his face. Blood was dripping down one of his cheeks now, and his hair was more red than white. He tried to speak and what came out instead was a dry and flailing old man’s cigarette cough.

“Filthy man. Filthy filthy man. For two cents I’d pull your pants down and yank that filthy thing right off you.” She turned and looked at her huddled son again, and the expression Bobby now saw in the one eye he could really see—the contempt, the accusation— made him cry harder. She didn’t say You too, but he saw it in her eye. Then she turned back to Ted.

“Know what? You’re going to jail.” She pointed a finger at him, and even through his tears Bobby saw the nail that had been on it when she left in Mr. Biderman’s Merc was gone; there was a bloody-ragged weal where it had been. Her voice was mushy, seeming to spread out somehow as it crossed her oversized lower lip. “I’m going to call the police now. If you’re wise you’ll sit still while I do it. Just keep your mouth shut and sit still.” Her voice was rising, rising. Her hands, scratched and swelled at the knuckles as well as broken at the nails, curled into fists which she shook at him. “If you run I’ll chase you and carve you up with my longest butcher knife. See if I don’t. I’ll do it right on the street for everyone to see, and I’ll start with the part of you that seems to give you . . . you boys . . . so much trouble. So sit still, Brattigan. If you want to live long enough to go to jail, don’t you move.”

The phone was on the table by the couch. She went to it. Ted sat with the table in his lap and blood flowing down his cheek. Bobby huddled next to the fallen clock, the one his mother had gotten with trading stamps. Drifting in the window on the breeze of Ted’s fan came Bowser’s cry: roop-roop-roop.

“You don’t know what happened here, Mrs. Garfield. What hap-pened to you was terrible and you have all my sympathy . . . but what happened to you is not what happened to Carol.”

“Shut up.” She wasn’t listening, didn’t even look in his direction.

Carol ran to Liz, reached out for her, then stopped. Her eyes grew large in her pale face. Her mouth dropped open. “They pulled your dress off?” It was half a whisper, half a moan. Liz stopped dial-ing and turned slowly to look at her. “Why did they pull your dress off?”

Liz seemed to think about how to answer. She seemed to think hard. “Shut up,” she said at last. “Just shut up, okay?”

“Why did they chase you? Who’s hitting?” Carol’s voice had become uneven. “Who’s hitting?”

“Shut up!” Liz dropped the telephone and put her hands to her ears. Bobby looked at her with growing horror.

Carol turned to him. Fresh tears were rolling down her cheeks. There was knowing in her eyes—knowing. The kind, Bobby thought, that he had felt while Mr. McQuown had been trying to fool him.

“They chased her,” Carol said. “When she tried to leave they chased her and made her come back.”

Bobby knew. They had chased her down a hotel corridor. He had seen it. He couldn’t remember where, but he had.

“Make them stop doing it! Make me stop seeing it!” Carol screamed. “She’s hitting them but she can’t get away! She’s hitting them but she can’t get away!”

Ted tipped the table out of his lap and struggled to his feet. His eyes were blazing. “Hug her, Carol! Hug her tight! That will make it stop!”

Carol threw her good arm around Bobby’s mother. Liz staggered backward a step, almost falling when one of her shoes hooked the leg of the sofa. She stayed up but the telephone tumbled to the rug beside one of Bobby’s outstretched sneakers, burring harshly.

For a moment things stayed that way—it was as if they were play-ing Statues and “it” had just yelled Freeze! It was Carol who moved first, releasing Liz Garfield’s waist and stepping back. Her sweaty hair hung in her eyes. Ted went toward her and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch her,” Liz said, but she spoke mechanically, without force. Whatever had flashed inside her at the sight of the child on Ted Brautigan’s lap had faded a little, at least temporarily. She looked exhausted.

Nonetheless, Ted dropped his hand. “You’re right,” he said.

Liz took a deep breath, held it, let it out. She looked at Bobby, then away. Bobby wished with all his heart that she would put her hand out to him, help him a little, help him get up, just that, but she turned to Carol instead. Bobby got to his feet on his own.

“What happened here?” Liz asked Carol.

Although she was still crying and her words kept hitching as she struggled for breath, Carol told Bobby’s mom about how the three big boys had found her in the park, and how at first it had seemed like just another one of their jokes, a bit meaner than most but still just a joke. Then Harry had really started hitting her while the others held her. The popping sound in her shoulder scared them and they ran away. She told Liz how Bobby had found her five or ten minutes later—she didn’t know how long because the pain had been so bad—and carried her up here. And how Ted had fixed her arm, after giving her Bobby’s belt to catch the pain with. She bent, picked up the belt, and showed Liz the tiny tooth-marks in it with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “I didn’t catch all of it, but I caught a lot.”

Liz only glanced at the belt before turning to Ted. “Why’d you tear her top off, chief?”

“It’s not torn!” Bobby cried. He was suddenly furious with her. “He cut it off so he could look at her shoulder and fix it without hurt-ing her! I brought him the scissors, for cripe’s sake! Why are you so stupid, Mom? Why can’t you see—”

She swung without turning, catching Bobby completely by sur-prise. The back of her open hand connected with the side of his face; her forefinger actually poked into his eye, sending a zag of pain deep into his head. His tears stopped as if the pump controlling them had suddenly shorted out.

“Don’t you call me stupid, Bobby-O,” she said. “Not on your ever-loving tintype.”

Carol was looking fearfully at the hook-nosed witch who had come back in a taxi wearing Mrs. Garfield’s clothes. Mrs. Garfield who had run and who had fought when she couldn’t run anymore. But in the end they had taken what they wanted from her.

“You shouldn’t hit Bobby,” Carol said. “He’s not like those men.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” She laughed. “Yeah? Good for you! But I’ll let you in on a secret, sweetheart—he’s just like his daddy and your daddy and all the rest of them. Go in the bathroom. I’ll clean you up and find something for you to wear. Christ what a mess!”

Carol looked at her a moment longer, then turned and went into the bathroom. Her bare back looked small and vulnerable. And white. So white in contrast to her brown arms.

“Carol!” Ted called after her. “Is it better now?” Bobby didn’t think he was talking about her arm. Not this time.

“Yes,” she said without turning. “But I can still hear her, far away. She’s screaming.”

“Who’s screaming?” Liz asked. Carol didn’t answer her. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. Liz looked at it for a moment, as if to make sure Carol wasn’t going to pop back out again, then turned to Ted. “Who’s screaming?”

Ted only looked at her warily, as if expecting another ICBM attack at any moment.

Liz began to smile. It was a smile Bobby knew: her I’m-losing-mytemper smile. Was it possible she had any left to lose? With her black eyes, broken nose, and swollen lip, the smile made her look horrid: not his mother but some lunatic.

“Quite the Good Samaritan, aren’t you? How many feels did you cop while you were fixing her up? She hasn’t got much, but I bet you checked what you could, didn’t you? Never miss an opportunity, right? Come on and fess up to your mamma.”

Bobby looked at her with growing despair. Carol had told her everything—all of the truth—and it made no difference. No differ-ence! God!

“There is a dangerous adult in this room,” Ted said, “but it isn’t me.”

She looked first uncomprehending, then incredulous, then furious. “How dare you? How dare you?”

“He didn’t do anything!” Bobby screamed. “Didn’t you hear what Carol said? Didn’t you—”

“Shut your mouth,” she said, not looking at him. She looked only at Ted. “T he cops are going to be very interested in you, I think. Don called Hartford on Friday, before . . . before. I asked him to. He has friends there. You never worked for the State of Connecticut, not in the Office of the Comptroller, not anywhere else. You were in jail, weren’t you?”

“In a way I suppose I was,” Ted said. He seemed calmer now in spite of the blood flowing down the side of his face. He took the cig-arettes out of his shirt pocket, looked at them, put them back. “But not the kind you’re thinking of.”

And not in this world, Bobby thought.

“What was it for?” she asked. “Making little girls feel better in the first degree?”

“I have something valuable,” Ted said. He reached up and tapped his temple. The finger he tapped with came away dotted with blood. “There are others like me. And there are people whose job it is to catch us, keep us, and use us for . . . well, use us, leave it at that. I and two others escaped. One was caught, one was killed. Only I remain free. If, that is . . .” He looked around. “. . . you call this freedom.”

“You’re crazy. Crazy old Brattigan, nuttier than a holiday fruit-cake. I’m calling the police. Let them decide if they want to put you back in the jail you broke out of or in Danbury Asylum.” She bent, reached for the spilled phone.

“No, Mom!” Bobby said, and reached for her. “Don’t—”

“Bobby, no!” Ted said sharply.

Bobby pulled back, looking first at his mom as she scooped up the phone, then at Ted.

“Not as she is now,” Ted told him. “As she is now, she can’t stop biting.”

Liz Garfield gave Ted a brilliant, almost unspeakable smile— Good try, you bastard—and took the receiver off the cradle.

“What’s happening?” Carol cried from the bathroom. “Can I come out now?”

“Not yet, darling,” Ted called back. “A little longer.”

Liz poked the telephone’s cutoff buttons up and down. She stopped, listened, seemed satisfied. She began to dial. “We’re going to find out who you are,” she said. She spoke in a strange, confiding tone. “That should be pretty interesting. And what you’ve done. That might be even more interesting.”

“If you call the police, they’ll also find out who you are and what you’ve done,” Ted said.

She stopped dialing and looked at him. It was a cunning sideways stare Bobby had never seen before. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“A foolish woman who should have chosen better. A foolish woman who had seen enough of her boss to know better—who had overheard him and his cronies often enough to know better, to know that any ‘seminar’ they attended mostly had to do with booze and sex-parties. Maybe a little reefer, as well. A foolish woman who let her greed overwhelm her good sense—”

“What do you know about being alone?” she cried. “I have a son to raise!” She looked at Bobby, as if remembering the son she had to raise for the first time in a little while.

“How much of this do you want him to hear?” Ted asked.

“You don’t know anything. You can’t.”

“I know everything. The question is, how much do you want Bobby to know? How much do you want your neighbors to know? If the police come and take me, they’ll know what I know, that I promise you.” He paused. His pupils remained steady but his eyes seemed to grow. “I know everything. Believe me—don’t put it to the test.”

“Why would you hurt me that way?”

“Given a choice I wouldn’t. You have been hurt enough, by your-self as well as by others. Let me leave, that’s all I’m asking you to do. I was leaving anyway. Let me leave. I did nothing but try to help.”

“Oh yes,” she said, and laughed. “Help. Her sitting on you practi-cally naked. Help.”

“I would help you if I—”

“Oh yeah, and I know how.” She laughed again.

Bobby started to speak and saw Ted’s eyes warning him not to. Behind the bathroom door, water was now running into the sink. Liz lowered her head, thinking. At last she raised it again.

“All right,” she said, “here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll help Bobby’s little girlfriend get cleaned up. I’ll give her an aspirin and find some-thing for her to wear home. While I’m doing those things, I’ll ask her a few questions. If the answers are the right answers, you can go. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Mom—”

Liz held up a hand like a traffic cop, silencing him. She was staring at Ted, who was looking back at her.

“I’ll walk her home, I’ll watch her go through her front door. What she decides to tell her mother is between the two of them. My job is to see her home safe, that’s all. When it’s done I’ll walk down to the park and sit in the shade for a little while. I had a rough night last night.” She drew in breath and let it out in a dry and rueful sigh. “Very rough. So I’ll go to the park and sit in the shade and think about what comes next. How I’m going to keep him and me out of the poorhouse.

“If I find you still here when I get back from the park, sweetheart, I will call the police . . . and don’t you put that to the test. Say what-ever you want. None of it’s going to matter much to anyone if I say I walked into my apartment a few hours sooner than you expected and found you with your hand inside an eleven-year-old girl’s shorts.”

Bobby stared at his mother in silent shock. She didn’t see the stare; she was still looking at Ted, her swollen eyes fixed on him intently.

“If, on the other hand, I came back and you’re gone, bag and bag-gage, I won’t have to call anyone or say anything. Tout fini.”

I’ll go with you! Bobby thought at Ted. I don’t care about the low men. I’d rather have a thousand low men in yellow coats looking for me—a million—than have to live with her anymore. I hate her!

“Well?” Liz asked.

“It’s a deal. I’ll be gone in an hour. Probably less.”

“No!” Bobby cried. When he’d awakened this morning he had been resigned to Ted’s going—sad but resigned. Now it hurt all over again. Worse than before, even. “No!”

“Be quiet,” his mother said, still not looking at him.

“It’s the only way, Bobby. You know that.” Ted looked up at Liz. “Take care of Carol. I’ll talk to Bobby.”

“You’re in no position to give orders,” Liz said, but she went. As she crossed to the bathroom, Bobby saw she was limping. A heel had broken off one of her shoes, but he didn’t think that was the only rea-son she couldn’t walk right. She knocked briefly on the bathroom door and then, without waiting for a response, slipped inside.

Bobby ran across the room, but when he tried to put his arms around Ted, the old man took his hands, squeezed them once briefly, then put them against Bobby’s chest and let go.

“Take me with you,” Bobby said fiercely. “I’ll help you look for them. Two sets of eyes are better than one. Take me with you!”

“I can’t do that, but you can come with me as far as the kitchen, Bobby. Carol isn’t the only one who needs to do some cleaning up.”

Ted rose from the chair and swayed on his feet for a moment. Bobby reached out to steady him and Ted once more pushed his hand gently but firmly away. It hurt. Not as much as his mother’s failure to help him up (or even look at him) after she had thrown him against the wall, but enough.

He walked with Ted to the kitchen, not touching him but close enough to grab him if he fell. Ted didn’t fall. He looked at the hazy reflection of himself in the window over the sink, sighed, then turned on the water. He wet the dishcloth and began to wipe the blood off his cheek, checking his window-reflection every now and then for reference.

“Your mother needs you more now than she ever has before,” he said. “She needs someone she can trust.”

“She doesn’t trust me. I don’t think she even likes me.”

Ted’s mouth tightened, and Bobby understood he had struck upon some truth Ted had seen in his mother’s mind. Bobby knew she did-n’t like him, he knew that, so why were the tears threatening again?

Ted reached out for him, seemed to remember that was a bad idea, and went back to work with the dishcloth instead. “All right,” he said. “Perhaps she doesn’t like you. If that’s true, it isn’t because of anything you did. It’s because of what you are.”

“A boy,” he said bitterly. “A fucking boy.”

“And your father’s son, don’t forget that. But Bobby . . . whether she likes you or not, she loves you. Such a greeting-card that sounds, I know, but it’s true. She loves you and she needs you. You’re what she has. She’s badly hurt right now—”

“Getting hurt was her own fault!” he burst out. “She knew some-thing was wrong! You said so yourself! She’s known for weeks! Months! But she wouldn’t leave that job! She knew and she still went with them to Providence! She went with them anyway!”

“A lion-tamer knows, but he still goes into the cage. He goes in because that’s where his paycheck is.”

“She’s got money,” Bobby almost spat.

“Not enough, apparently.”

“She’ll never have enough,” Bobby said, and knew it was the truth as soon as it was out of his mouth.

“She loves you.”

“I don’t care! I don’t love her!”

“But you do. You will. You must. It is ka.”

“Ka? What’s that?”

“Destiny.” Ted had gotten most of the blood out of his hair. He turned off the water and made one final check of his ghost-image in the window. Beyond it lay all of that hot summer, younger than Ted Brautigan would ever be again. Younger than Bobby would ever be again, for that matter. “Ka is destiny. Do you care for me, Bobby?”

“You know I do,” Bobby said, beginning to cry again. Lately cry-ing was all he seemed to do. His eyes ached from it. “Lots and lots.”

“Then try to be your mother’s friend. For my sake if not your own. Stay with her and help this hurt of hers to heal. And every now and then I’ll send you a postcard.”

They were walking back into the living room again. Bobby was starting to feel a little bit better, but he wished Ted could have put his arm around him. He wished that more than anything.

The bathroom door opened. Carol came out first, looking down at her own feet with uncharacteristic shyness. Her hair had been wet-ted, combed back, and rubber-banded into a ponytail. She was wear-ing one of Bobby’s mother’s old blouses; it was so big it came almost down to her knees, like a dress. You couldn’t see her red shorts at all.

“Go out on the porch and wait,” Liz said.

“Okay.”

“You won’t go walking home without me, will you?”

“No!” Carol said, and her downcast face filled with alarm.

“Good. Stand right by my suitcases.”

Carol started out to the foyer, then turned back. “Thanks for fixing my arm, Ted. I hope you don’t get in trouble for it. I didn’t want—”

“Go out on the damned porch,” Liz snapped.

“—anyone to get in trouble,” Carol finished in a tiny voice, almost the whisper of a mouse in a cartoon. Then she went out, Liz’s blouse flap-ping around her in a way that would have been comical on another day. Liz turned to Bobby and when he got a good look at her, his heart sank. Her fury had been refreshed. A bright red flush had spread over her bruised face and down her neck.

Oh cripes, what now? Bobby thought. Then she held up the green keyfob, and he knew.

“Where did you get this, Bobby-O?”

“I . . . it . . .” But he could think of nothing to say: no fib, no out-right lie, not even the truth. Suddenly Bobby felt very tired. The only thing in the world he wanted to do was creep into his bedroom and hide under the covers of his bed and go to sleep.

“I gave it to him,” Ted said mildly. “Yesterday.”

“You took my son to a bookie joint in Bridgeport? A poker-parlor in Bridgeport?”

It doesn’t say bookie joint on the keyfob, Bobby thought. It does-n’t say poker-parlor, either . . . because those things are against the law. She knows what goes on there because my father went there. And like father like son. That’s what they say, like father like son.

“I took him to a movie,” Ted said. “Village of the Damned, at the Criterion. While he was watching, I went to The Corner Pocket to do an errand.”

“What sort of errand?”

“I placed a bet on a prizefight.” For a moment Bobby’s heart sank even lower and he thought, What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you lie? If you knew how she felt about stuff like that—

But he did know. Of course he did.

“A bet on a prizefight.” She nodded. “Uh-huh. You left my son alone in a Bridgeport movie theater so you could go make a bet on a prizefight.” She laughed wildly. “Oh well, I suppose I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? You brought him such a nice souvenir. If he decides to ever make a bet himself, or lose his money playing poker like his father did, he’ll know where to go.”

“I left him for two hours in a movie theater,” Ted said. “You left him with me. He seems to have survived both, hasn’t he?”

Liz looked for a moment as if she had been slapped, then for a moment as if she would cry. Then her face smoothed out and became expressionless. She curled her fist around the green keyfob and slipped it into her dress pocket. Bobby knew he would never see it again. He didn’t mind. He didn’t want to see it again.

“Bobby, go in your room,” she said.

“No.”

“Bobby, go in your room!”

“No! I won’t!”

Standing in a bar of sunlight on the welcome mat by Liz Garfield’s suitcases, floating in Liz Garfield’s old blouse, Carol began to cry at the sound of the raised voices.

“Go in your room, Bobby,” Ted said quietly. “I have enjoyed meet-ing you and knowing you.”

“Knowing you,” Bobby’s mom said in an angry, insinuating voice, but Bobby didn’t understand her and Ted took no notice of her.

“Go in your room,” he repeated.

“Will you be all right? You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” Ted smiled, kissed his fingers, and blew the kiss toward Bobby. Bobby caught it and made a fist around it, holding it tight. “I’m going to be just fine.”

Bobby walked slowly toward his bedroom door, his head down and his eyes on the toes of his sneakers. He was almost there when he thought I can’t do this, I can’t let him go like this.

He ran to Ted, threw his arms around him, and covered his face with kisses—forehead, cheeks, chin, lips, the thin and silky lids of his eyes. “Ted, I love you!”

Ted gave up and hugged him tight. Bobby could smell a ghost of the lather he shaved with, and the stronger aroma of his Chesterfield cigarettes. They were smells he would carry with him a long time, as he would the memories of Ted’s big hands touching him, stroking his back, cupping the curve of his skull. “Bobby, I love you too,” he said.

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Liz nearly screamed. Bobby turned toward her and what he saw was Don Biderman pushing her into a corner. Somewhere the Benny Goodman Orchestra was playing “One O’Clock Jump” on a hi-fi turned all the way up. Mr. Biderman had his hand out as if to slap. Mr. Biderman was asking her if she wanted a little more, was that the way she liked it, she could have a little more if that was the way she liked it. Bobby could almost taste her horrified understanding.

“You really didn’t know, did you?” he said. “At least not all of it, all they wanted. They thought you did, but you didn’t.”

“Go in your room right now or I’m calling the police and telling them to send a squad-car,” his mother said. “I’m not joking, Bobby-O.”

“I know you’re not,” Bobby said. He went into his bedroom and closed the door. He thought at first he was all right and then he thought that he was going to throw up, or faint, or do both. He walked across to his bed on tottery, unstable legs. He only meant to sit on it but he lay back on it crosswise instead, as if all the muscles had gone out of his stomach and back. He tried to lift his feet up but his legs only lay there, the muscles gone from them, too. He had a sudden image of Sully-John in his bathing suit, climbing the ladder of a swimming float, running to the end of the board, diving off. He wished he was with S-J now. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but here. Anywhere at all but here.

When Bobby woke up, the light in his room had grown dim and when he looked at the floor he could barely see the shadow of the tree outside his window. He had been out—asleep or unconscious—for three hours, maybe four. He was covered with sweat and his legs were numb; he had never pulled them up onto the bed.

Now he tried, and the burst of pins and needles which resulted almost made him scream. He slid onto the floor instead, and the pins and needles ran up his thighs to his crotch. He sat with his knees up around his ears, his back throbbing, his legs buzzing, his head cottony. Something terrible had happened, but at first he couldn’t remember what. As he sat there propped against the bed, looking across at Clayton Moore in his Lone Ranger mask, it began to come back. Carol’s arm dislocated, his mother beaten up and half-crazy as well, shaking that green keyfob in his face, furious with him. And Ted . . .

Ted would be gone by now, and that was probably for the best, but how it hurt to think of.

He got to his feet and walked twice around the room. The second time he stopped at the window and looked out, rubbing his hands together at the back of his neck, which was stiff and sweaty. A little way down the street the Sigsby twins, Dina and Dianne, were jump-ing rope, but the other kids had gone in, either for supper or for the night. A car slid by, showing its parking lights. It was even later than he had at first thought; heavenly shades of night were falling.

He made another circuit of his room, working the tingles out of his legs, feeling like a prisoner pacing his cell. The door had no lock on it—no more than his mom’s did—but he felt like a jailbird just the same. He was afraid to go out. She hadn’t called him for supper, and although he was hungry—a little, anyway—he was afraid to go out. He was afraid of how he might find her . . . or of not finding her at all. Suppose she had decided she’d finally had enough of Bobby-O, stupid lying little Bobby-O, his father’s son? Even if she was here, and seemingly back to normal . . . was there even such a thing as nor-mal? People had terrible things behind their faces sometimes. He knew that now.

When he reached the closed door of his room, he stopped. There was a scrap of paper lying there. He bent and picked it up. There was still plenty of light and he could read it easily.

Dear Bobby—

By the time you read this, I’ll be gone . . . but I’ll take you with me in my thoughts. Please love your mother and remem-ber that she loves you. She was afraid and hurt and ashamed this afternoon, and when we see people that way, we see them at their worst. I have left you something in my room. I will remember my promise.

All my love,

TED

The postcards, that’s what he promised. To send me postcards.

Feeling better, Bobby folded up the note Ted had slipped into his room before leaving and opened his bedroom door.

The living room was empty, but it had been set to rights. It looked almost okay if you didn’t know there was supposed to be a sunburst clock on the wall beside the TV; now there was just the little screw where it had hung, jutting out and holding nothing.

Bobby realized he could hear his mother snoring in her room. She always snored, but this was a heavy snore, like an old person or a drunk snoring in a movie. That’s because they hurt her, Bobby thought, and for a moment he thought of

(Howya doin Sport howza boy)

Mr. Biderman and the two nimrods elbowing each other in the back seat and grinning. Kill the pig, cut her throat, Bobby thought. He didn’t want to think it but he did.

He tiptoed across the living room as quietly as Jack in the giant’s castle, opened the door to the foyer, and went out. He tiptoed up the first flight of stairs (walking on the bannister side, because he’d read in one of the Hardy Boys mysteries that if you walked that way the stairs didn’t creak so much), and ran up the second.

Ted’s door stood open; the room beyond it was almost empty. T he few things of his own he’d put up—a picture of a man fishing at sun-set, a picture of Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet, a calendar— were gone. The ashtray on the table was empty, but sitting beside it was one of Ted’s carryhandle bags. Inside it were four paperback books: Animal Farm, The Night of the Hunter, Treasure Island, and Of Mice and Men. Written on the side of the paper bag in Ted’s shaky but completely legible handwriting was: Read the Steinbeck first. “Guys like us,” George says when he tells Lennie the story Lennie always wants to hear. Who are guys like us? Who were they to Steinbeck? Who are they to you? Ask yourself this.

Bobby took the paperbacks but left the bag—he was afraid that if his mom saw one of Ted’s carryhandle bags she would go crazy all over again. He looked in the refrigerator and saw nothing but a bot-tle of French’s mustard and a box of baking soda. He closed the fridge again and looked around. It was as if no one had ever lived here at all. Except—

He went to the ashtray, held it to his nose, and breathed in deeply. The smell of Chesterfields was strong, and it brought Ted back com-pletely, Ted sitting here at his table and talking about Lord of the Flies, Ted standing at his bathroom mirror, shaving with that scary razor of his, listening through the open door as Bobby read him opin-ion pieces Bobby himself didn’t understand.

Ted leaving one final question on the side of a paper bag: Guys like us. Who are guys like us?

Bobby breathed in again, sucking up little flakes of ash and fight-ing back the urge to sneeze, holding the smell in, fixing it in his memory as best he could, closing his eyes, and in through the win-dow came the endless ineluctable cry of Bowser, now calling down the dark like a dream: roop-roop-roop, roop-roop-roop.

He put the ashtray down again. The urge to sneeze had passed. I’m going to smoke Chesterfields, he decided. I’m going to smoke them all my life.

He went back downstairs, holding the paperbacks in front of him and walking on the outside of the staircase again as he went from the second floor to the foyer. He slipped into the apartment, tiptoed across the living room (his mother was still snoring, louder than ever), and into his bedroom. He put the books under his bed—deep under. If his mom found them he would say Mr. Burton had given them to him. That was a lie, but if he told the truth she’d take the books away. Besides, lying no longer seemed so bad. Lying might become a necessity. In time it might even become a pleasure.

What next? The rumble in his stomach decided him. A couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were next.

He started for the kitchen, tiptoeing past his mother’s partly open bedroom door without even thinking about it, then paused. She was shifting around on her bed. Her snores had become ragged and she was talking in her sleep. It was a low, moaning talk Bobby couldn’t make out, but he realized he didn’t have to make it out. He could hear her anyway. And he could see stuff. Her thoughts? Her dreams? Whatever it was, it was awful.

He managed three more steps toward the kitchen, then caught a glimpse of something so terrible his breath froze in his throat like ice: HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN! He is an OLD MONGREL but WE LOVE HIM!

“No,” he whispered. “Oh Mom, no.”

He didn’t want to go in there where she was, but his feet turned in that direction anyway. He went with them like a hostage. He watched his hand reach out, the fingers spread, and push her bed-room door open all the way.

Her bed was still made. She lay on top of the coverlet in her dress, one leg drawn up so her knee almost touched her chest. He could see the top of her stocking and her garter, and that made him think of the lady in the calendar picture at The Corner Pocket, the one get-ting out of the car with most of her skirt in her lap . . . except the lady getting out of the Packard hadn’t had ugly bruises above the top of her stocking.

Liz’s face was flushed where it wasn’t bruised; her hair was matted with sweat; her cheeks were smeary with tears and gooey with makeup. A board creaked under Bobby’s foot as he stepped into the room. She cried out and he froze, sure her eyes would open.

Instead of awakening she rolled away from him toward the wall. Here, in her room, the jumble of thoughts and images coming out of her was no clearer but ranker and more pungent, like sweat pouring off a sick person. Running through everything was the sound of Benny Goodman playing “One O’Clock Jump” and the taste of blood running down the back of her throat.

Have you seen Brautigan, Bobby thought. He is an old mongrel but we love him. Have you seen . . .

She had pulled her shades before lying down and the room was very dark. He took another step, then stopped again by the table with the mirror where she sometimes sat to do her makeup. Her purse was there. Bobby thought of Ted hugging him—the hug Bobby had wanted, needed, so badly. Ted stroking his back, cupping the curve of his skull. When I touch, I pass on a kind of window, Ted had told him while they were coming back from Bridgeport in the cab. And now, standing by his mother’s makeup table with his fists clenched, Bobby looked tentatively through that window into his mother’s mind.

He caught a glimpse of her coming home on the train, huddling by herself, looking into ten thousand back yards between Providence and Harwich so as few people as possible would see her face; he saw her spy-ing the bright green keyfob on the shelf by the toothglass as Carol slipped into her old blouse; saw her walking Carol home, asking her questions the whole way, one after another, firing them like bullets out of a machine-gun. Carol, too shaken and worn out to dissemble, had answered them all. Bobby saw his mother walking—limping—down to Commonwealth Park, heard her thinking If only some good could be salvaged from this nightmare, if only some good, anything good—

He saw her sit on a bench in the shade and then get up after awhile, walking toward Spicer’s for a headache powder and a Nehi to wash it down with before going back home. And then, just before leaving the park, Bobby saw her spy something tacked to a tree. These somethings were tacked up all over town; she might have passed a couple on her way to the park, so lost in thought she never noticed.

Once again Bobby felt like a passenger in his own body, no more than that. He watched his hand reach out, saw two fingers (the ones that would bear the yellow smudges of the heavy smoker in another few years) make a scissoring motion and catch what was protruding from the mouth of her purse. Bobby pulled the paper free, unfolded it, and read the first two lines in the faint light from the bedroom doorway:

HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN!He is an OLD MONGREL but WE LOVE HIM!

His eyes skipped halfway down to the lines that had no doubt riv-eted his mother and driven every other thought from her head:

We will pay A VERY LARGE REWARD ($ $ $ $)

Here was the something good she had been wishing for, hoping for, praying for; here was A VERY LARGE REWARD.

And had she hesitated? Had the thought “Wait a minute, my kid loves that old bastard-ball!” even crossed her mind?

Nah.

You couldn’t hesitate. Because life was full of Don Bidermans, and life wasn’t fair.

Bobby left the room on tiptoe with the poster still in his hand, mincing away from her in big soft steps, freezing when a board creaked under his feet, then moving on. Behind him his mom’s mut-tering talk had subsided into low snores again. Bobby made it into the living room and closed her door behind him, holding the knob at full cock until the door was shut tight, not wanting the latch to click. Then he hurried across to the phone, aware only now that he was away from her that his heart was racing and his throat was lined with a taste like old pennies. Any vestige of hunger had vanished.

He picked up the telephone’s handset, looked around quickly and narrowly to make sure his mom’s door was still shut, then dialed without referring to the poster. The number was burned into his mind: HOusitonic 5-8337.

There was only silence when he finished dialing. That wasn’t sur-prising, either, because there was no HOusitonic exchange in Har-wich. And if he felt cold all over (except for his balls and the soles of his feet, which were strangely hot), that was just because he was afraid for Ted. T hat was all. Just—

There was a stonelike click as Bobby was about to put the handset down. And then a voice said, “Yeah?”

It’s Biderman! Bobby thought wildly. Cripes, it’s Biderman!

“Yeah?” the voice said again. No, not Biderman’s. Too low for Biderman’s. But it was a nimrod voice, no doubt about that, and as his skin temperature continued to plummet toward absolute zero, Bobby knew that the man on the other end of the line had some sort of yellow coat in his wardrobe.

Suddenly his eyes grew hot and the backs of them began itching. Is this the Sagamore Family? was what he’d meant to ask, and if whoever answered the phone said yes, he’d meant to beg them to leave Ted alone. To tell them he, Bobby Garfield, would do some-thing for them if they’d just leave Ted be—he’d do anything they asked. But now that his chance had arrived he could say nothing. Until this moment he still hadn’t completely believed in the low men. Now something was on the other end of the line, something that had nothing in common with life as Bobby Garfield understood it.

“Bobby?” the voice said, and there was a kind of insinuate pleasure in the voice, a sensuous recognition. “Bobby,” it said again, this time without the question-mark. The flecks began to stream across Bobby’s vision; the living room of the apartment suddenly filled with black snow.

“Please . . .” Bobby whispered. He gathered all of his will and forced himself to finish. “Please let him go.”

“No can do,” the voice from the void told him. “He belongs to the King. Stay away, Bobby. Don’t interfere. Ted’s our dog. If you don’t want to be our dog, too, stay away.”

Click.

Bobby held the telephone to his ear a moment longer, needing to tremble and too cold to do it. The itching behind his eyes began to fade, though, and the threads falling across his vision began to merge into the general murk. At last he took the phone away from the side of his head, started to put it down, then paused. There were dozens of little red circles on the handset’s perforated earpiece. It was as if the voice of the thing on the other end had caused the telephone to bleed.

Panting in soft and rapid little whimpers, Bobby put it back in its cradle and went into his room. Don’t interfere, the man at the Sag-amore Family number had told him. Ted’s our dog. But Ted wasn’t a dog. He was a man, and he was Bobby’s friend.

She could have told them where he’ll be tonight, Bobby thought. I think Carol knew. If she did, and if she told Mom—

Bobby grabbed the Bike Fund jar. He took all the money out of it and left the apartment. He considered leaving his mother a note but didn’t. She might call HOusitonic 5-8337 again if he did, and tell the nimrod with the low voice what her Bobby-O was doing. That was one reason for not leaving a note. The other was that if he could warn Ted in time, he’d go with him. Now Ted would have to let him come. And if the low men killed him or kidnapped him? Well, those things were almost the same as running away, weren’t they?

Bobby took a final look around the apartment, and as he listened to his mother snore he felt an involuntary tugging at his heart and mind. Ted was right: in spite of everything, he loved her still. If there was ka, then loving her was part of his.

Still, he hoped to never see her again.

“Bye, Mom,” Bobby whispered. A minute later he was running down Broad Street Hill into the deepening gloom, one hand wrapped around the wad of money in his pocket so none of it would bounce out.

X. DOWN THERE AGAIN. CORNER BOYS. LOW MEN IN YELLOW COATS. THE PAYOUT.

He called a cab from the pay telephone at Spicer’s, and while he waited for his ride he took down a BRAUTIGAN lost-pet poster from the outside bulletin board. He also removed an upside-down file-card advertising a ’57 Rambler for sale by the owner. He crumpled them up and threw them in the trash barrel by the door, not even bothering to look back over his shoulder to see if old man Spicer, whose foul temper was legendary among the kids on the west side of Harwich, had seen him do it.

The Sigsby twins were down here now, their jump-ropes put aside so they could play hopscotch. Bobby walked over to them and observed the shapes—

—drawn beside the grid. He got down on his knees, and Dina Sigsby, who had been about to toss her stone at the 7, stopped to watch him. Dianne put her grimy fingers over her mouth and giggled. Ignoring them, Bobby used both of his hands to sweep the shapes into chalk blurs. When he was done he stood up and dusted his hands off. The pole-light in Spicer’s tiny three-car parking lot came on; Bobby and the girls grew sudden shadows much longer than they were.

“Why’d you do that, stupid old Bobby Garfield?” Dina asked. “They were pretty.”

“They’re bad luck,” Bobby said. “Why aren’t you at home?” Not that he didn’t have a good idea; it was flashing in their heads like the beer-signs in Spicer’s window.

“Mumma-Daddy havin a fight,” Dianne said. “She says he got a girlfriend.” She laughed and her sister joined in, but their eyes were frightened. They reminded Bobby of the littluns in Lord of the Flies.

“Go home before it gets all the way dark,” he said.

“Mumma said stay out,” Dina told him.

“Then she’s stupid and so is your father. Go on!”

They exchanged a glance and Bobby understood that he had scared them even more. He didn’t care. He watched them grab their jump-ropes and go running up the hill. Five minutes later the cab he’d called pulled into the parking area beside the store, its head-lights fanning the gravel.

“Huh,” the cabbie said. “I dunno about taking any little kid to Bridgeport after dark, even if you do got the fare.”

“It’s okay,” Bobby said, getting in back. If the cabbie meant to throw him out now, he’d better have a crowbar in the trunk to do it with. “My grandfather will meet me.” But not at The Corner Pocket, Bobby had already decided; he wasn’t going to pull up to the place in a Checker. Someone might be watching for him. “At the Wo Fat Noodle Company. That’s on Narragansett Avenue.” The Corner Pocket was also on Narragansett. He hadn’t remembered the street-name but had found it easily enough in the Yellow Pages after calling the cab.

The driver had started to back out into the street. Now he paused again. “Nasty Gansett Street? Christ, that’s no part of town for a kid. Not even in broad daylight.”

“My grandfather’s meeting me,” Bobby repeated. “He said to tip you half a rock. You know, fifty cents.”

For a moment the cabbie teetered. Bobby tried to think of some other way to persuade him and couldn’t think of a thing. Then the cabbie sighed, dropped his flag, and got rolling. As they passed his building, Bobby looked to see if there were any lights on in their apartment. There weren’t, not yet. He sat back and waited for Har-wich to drop behind them.

The cabbie’s name was Roy DeLois, it was on his taxi-meter. He didn’t say a word on the ride to Bridgeport. He was sad because he’d had to take Pete to the vet and have him put down. Pete had been fourteen. That was old for a Collie. He had been Roy DeLois’s only real friend. Go on, big boy, eat up, it’s on me, Roy DeLois would say when he fed Pete. He said the same thing every night. Roy DeLois was divorced. Sometimes he went to a stripper club in Hartford. Bobby could see ghost-images of the dancers, most of whom wore feathers and long white gloves. The image of Pete was sharper. Roy DeLois had been okay coming back from the vet’s, but when he saw Pete’s empty dish in the pantry at home, he had broken down crying.

They passed The William Penn Grille. Bright light streamed from every window and the street was lined with cars on both sides for three blocks, but Bobby saw no crazy DeSotos or other cars that felt like thinly disguised living creatures. The backs of his eyes didn’t itch; there were no black threads.

The cab crossed the canal bridge and then they were down there. Loud Spanish-sounding music played from apartment houses with fire escapes zig-zagging up the sides like iron lightning. Clusters of young men with gleaming combed-back hair stood on some street-corners; clusters of laughing girls stood on others. When the Checker stopped at a red light, a brown-skinned man sauntered over, hips seeming to roll like oil in gabardine slacks that hung below the waist-band of his bright white underwear shorts, and offered to wash the cabbie’s windshield with a filthy rag he held. Roy DeLois shook his head curtly and squirted away the instant the light changed.

“Goddam spics,” he said. “They should be barred from the coun-try. Ain’t we got enough niggers of our own?”

Narragansett Street looked different at night—slightly scarier, slightly more fabulous as well. Locksmiths . . . check-cashing services . . . a couple of bars spilling out laughter and jukebox music and guys with beer bottles in their hands . . . ROD’S GUNS . . . and yes, just beyond Rod’s and next to the shop selling SPECIAL SOUVENIRS, the WO FATNOODLE CO. From here it couldn’t be more than four blocks to The Corner Pocket. It was only eight o’clock. Bobby was in plenty of time.

When Roy DeLois pulled up to the curb, there was eighty cents on his meter. Add in a fifty-cent tip and you were talking about a big hole in the old Bike Fund, but Bobby didn’t care. He was never going to make a big deal out of money the way she did. If he could warn Ted before the low men could grab him, Bobby would be con-tent to walk forever.

“I don’t like leaving you off here,” Roy DeLois said. “Where’s your grandpa?”

“Oh, he’ll be right along,” Bobby said, striving for a cheerful tone and almost making it. It was really amazing what you could do when your back was against the wall.

He held out the money. For a moment Roy DeLois hesitated instead of taking the dough; thought about driving him back to Spicer’s, but if the kid’s not telling the truth about his grandpa what’s he doing down here? Roy DeLois thought. He’s too young to want to get laid.

I’m fine, Bobby sent back . . . and yes, he thought he could do that, too—a little, anyway. Go on, stop worrying, I’m fine.

Roy DeLois finally took the crumpled dollar and the trio of dimes. “This is really too much,” he said.

“My grandpa told me to never be stingy like some people are,” Bobby said, getting out of the cab. “Maybe you ought to get a new dog. You know, a puppy.”

Roy DeLois was maybe fifty, but surprise made him look much younger. “How . . .”

Then Bobby heard him decide he didn’t care how. Roy DeLois put his cab in gear and drove away, leaving Bobby in front of the Wo Fat Noodle Company.

He stood there until the cab’s taillights disappeared, then began walking slowly in the direction of The Corner Pocket, pausing long enough to look through the dusty window of SPECIAL SOUVENIRS.The bamboo blind was up but the only special souvenir on display was a ceramic ashtray in the shape of a toilet. There was a groove for a cig-arette in the seat. PARK YOUR BUTT was written on the tank. Bobby considered this quite witty but not much of a window display; he had sort of been hoping for items of a sexual nature. Especially now that the sun had gone down.

He walked on, past B’PORTPRINTING and SHOES REPAIRED WHILE U WAIT and SNAPPY KARDS FOR ALL OKASIONS. Up ahead was another bar, more young men on the corner, and the sound of The Cadillacs: Brrrrr, black slacks, make ya cool, Daddy-O, when ya put em on you’re a-rarin to go. Bobby crossed the street, trotting with his shoulders hunched, his head down, and his hands in his pockets.

Across from the bar was an out-of-business restaurant with a tat-tered awning still overhanging its soaped windows. Bobby slipped into its shadow and kept going, shrinking back once when someone shouted and a bottle shattered. When he reached the next corner he re-crossed Nasty Gansett Street on the diagonal, getting back to the side The Corner Pocket was on.

As he went, he tried to tune his mind outward and pick up some sense of Ted, but there was nothing. Bobby wasn’t all that surprised. If he had been Ted, he would have gone someplace like the Bridge-port Public Library where he could hang around without being noticed. Maybe after the library closed he’d get a bite to eat, kill a lit-tle more time that way. Eventually he’d call another cab and come to collect his money. Bobby didn’t think he was anywhere close yet, but he kept listening for him. He was listening so hard that he walked into a guy without even seeing him.

“Hey, cabrón!” the guy said—laughing, but not in a nice way. Hands grabbed Bobby’s shoulders and held him. “Where was you think you goin, putino?”

Bobby looked up and saw four young guys, what his mom would have called corner boys, standing in front of a place called BODEGA. They were Puerto Ricans, he thought, and all wearing sharp-creased slacks. Black boots with pointed toes poked out from beneath their pants cuffs. They were also wearing blue silk jackets with the word DIABLOS written on the back. The I was a devil’s pitchfork. Some-thing seemed familiar about the pitchfork, but Bobby had no time to think about that. He realized with a sinking heart that he had wan-dered into four members of some gang.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a dry voice. “Really, I . . . ’scuse me.”

He pulled back from the hands holding his shoulders and started around the guy. He made just a single step before one of the others grabbed him. “Where you goin, tío?” this one asked. “Where you goin, tío mío?”

Bobby pulled free, but the fourth guy pushed him back at the sec-ond. The second guy grabbed him again, not so gently this time. It was like being surrounded by Harry and his friends, only worse.

“You got any money, tío?” asked the third guy. “Cause this a toll-road, you know.”

They all laughed and moved in closer. Bobby could smell their spicy aftershaves, their hair tonics, his own fear. He couldn’t hear their mind-voices, but did he need to? They were probably going to beat him up and steal his money. If he was lucky that was all they’d do . . . but he might not be lucky.

“Little boy,” the fourth guy almost sang. He reached out a hand, gripped the bristles of Bobby’s crewcut, and pulled hard enough to make tears well up in Bobby’s eyes. “Little muchacho, what you got for money, huh? How much of the good old dinero? You have some-thing and we going to let you go. You have nothing and we going to bust your balls.”

“Leave him alone, Juan.”

They looked around—Bobby too—and here came a fifth guy, also wearing a Diablos jacket, also wearing slacks with a sharp crease; he had on loafers instead of pointy-toed boots, and Bobby recognized him at once. It was the young man who had been playing the Fron-tier Patrol game in The Corner Pocket when Ted was making his bet. No wonder that pitchfork shape had looked familiar—it was tat-tooed on the guy’s hand. His jacket had been tied inside-out around his waist (no club jacket in here, he had told Bobby), but he wore the sign of the Diablos just the same.

Bobby tried to look into the newcomer’s mind and saw only dim shapes. His ability was fading again, as it had on the day Mrs. Gerber took them to Savin Rock; shortly after they left McQuown’s stand at the end of the midway, it had been gone. This time the winkle had lasted longer, but it was going now, all right.

“Hey Dee,” said the boy who had pulled Bobby’s hair. “We just gonna shake this little guy out a little. Make him pay his way across Diablo turf.”

“Not this one,” Dee said. “I know him. He’s my compadre.”

“He look like a pansy uptown boy to me,” said the one who had called Bobby cabrón and putino. “I teach im a little respect.”

“He don’t need no lesson from you,” Dee said. “You want one from me, Moso?”

Moso stepped back, frowning, and took a cigarette out of his pocket. One of the others snapped him a light, and Dee drew Bobby a little farther down the street.

“What you doing down here, amigo?” he asked, gripping Bobby’s shoulder with the tattooed hand. “You stupid to be down here alone and you fuckin loco to be down here at night alone.”

“I can’t help it,” Bobby said. “I have to find the guy I was with yes-terday. His name is Ted. He’s old and thin and pretty tall. He walks kinda hunched over, like Boris Karloff—you know, the guy in the scary movies?”

“I know Boris Karloff but I don’t know no fuckin Ted,” Dee said. “I don’t ever see him. Man, you ought to get outta here.”

“I have to go to The Corner Pocket,” Bobby said.

“I was just there,” Dee said. “I didn’t see no guy like Boris Karloff.”

“It’s still too early. I think he’ll be there between nine-thirty and ten. I have to be there when he comes, because there’s some men after him. They wear yellow coats and white shoes . . . they drive big flashy cars . . . one of them’s a purple DeSoto, and—”

Dee grabbed him and spun him against the door of a pawnshop so hard that for a moment Bobby thought he had decided to go along with his corner-boy friends after all. Inside the pawnshop an old man with a pair of glasses pushed up on his bald head looked around, annoyed, then back down at the newspaper he was reading.

“The jefes in the long yellow coats,” Dee breathed. “I seen those guys. Some of the others seen em, too. You don’t want to mess with boys like that, chico. Something wrong with those boys. They don’t look right. Make the bad boys hang around Mallory’s Saloon look like good boys.”

Something in Dee’s expression reminded Bobby of Sully-John, and he remembered S-J saying he’d seen a couple of weird guys out-side Commonwealth Park. When Bobby asked what was weird about them, Sully said he didn’t exactly know. Bobby knew, though. Sully had seen the low men. Even then they had been sniffing around.

“When did you see them?” Bobby asked. “Today?”

“Cat, give me a break,” Dee said. “I ain’t been up but two hours, and most of that I been in the bathroom, makin myself pretty for the street. I seen em comin out of The Corner Pocket, a pair of em—day before yesterday, I think. And that place funny lately.” He thought for a moment, then called, “Yo, Juan, get your ass over here.”

The crewcut-puller came trotting over. Dee spoke to him in Span-ish. Juan spoke back and Dee responded more briefly, pointing to Bobby. Juan leaned over Bobby, hands on the knees of his sharp pants.

“You seen ’ese guys, huh?”

Bobby nodded.

“One bunch in a big purple DeSoto? One bunch in a Cri’sler? One bunch in an Olds 98?”

Bobby only knew the DeSoto, but he nodded.

“Those cars ain’t real cars,” Juan said. He looked sideways at Dee to see if Dee was laughing. Dee wasn’t; he only nodded for Juan to keep going. “They something else.”

“I think they’re alive,” Bobby said.Juan’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Like alive! And ’ose men—”“What did they look like? I’ve seen one of their cars, but not

them.”

Juan tried but couldn’t say, at least not in English. He lapsed into Spanish instead. Dee translated some of it, but in an absent fashion; more and more he was conversing with Juan and ignoring Bobby. The other corner boys—and boys were what they really were, Bobby saw—drew close and added their own contributions. Bobby couldn’t understand their talk, but he thought they were scared, all of them. They were tough enough guys—down here you had to be tough just to make it through the day—but the low men had frightened them all the same. Bobby caught one final clear image: a tall striding figure in a calf-length mustard-colored coat, the kind of coat men sometimes wore in movies like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and The Magnificent Seven.

“I see four of em comin out of that barber shop with the horse-parlor in the back,” the one who seemed to be named Filio said. “That’s what they do, those guys, go into places and ask questions. Always leave one of their big cars runnin at the curb. You’d think it’d be crazy to do that down here, leave a car runnin at the curb, but who’d steal one of those goddam things?”

No one, Bobby knew. If you tried, the steering wheel might turn into a snake and strangle you; the seat might turn into a quicksand pool and drown you.

“They come out all in a bunch,” Filio went on, “all wearin ’ose long yellow coats even though the day’s so hot you coulda fried a egg on the fuckin sidewalk. They was all wearin these nice white shoes— sharp, you know how I always notice what people got on their feet, I get hard for that shit—and I don’t think . . . I don’t think . . .” He paused, gathered himself, and said something to Dee in Spanish.

Bobby asked what he’d said.

“He sayin their shoes wasn’ touchin the ground,” Juan replied. His eyes were big. There was no scorn or disbelief in them. “He sayin they got this big red Cri’sler, and when they go back to it, their fuckin shoes ain’t quite touchin the ground.” Juan forked two fingers in front of his mouth, spat through them, then crossed himself.

No one said anything for a moment or two after that, and then Dee bent gravely over Bobby again. “These are the guys lookin for your frien’?”

“That’s right,” Bobby said. “I have to warn him.”

He had a mad idea that Dee would offer to go with him to The Corner Pocket, and then the rest of the Diablos would join in; they would walk up the street snapping their fingers in unison like the Jets in West Side Story. They would be his friends now, gang guys who happened to have really good hearts.

Of course nothing of the sort happened. What happened was Moso wandered off, back toward the place where Bobby had walked into him. The others followed. Juan paused long enough to say, “You run into those caballeros and you gonna be one dead putino, tío mío.” Only Dee was left and Dee said, “He’s right. You ought to go back to your own part of the worl’, my frien’. Let your amigo take care of him-self.”

“I can’t,” Bobby said. And then, with genuine curiosity: “Could you?”

“Not against ordinary guys, maybe, but these ain’t ordinary guys. Was you just lissen?”

“Yes,” Bobby said. “But.”

“You crazy, little boy. Poco loco.”

“I guess so.” He felt crazy, all right. Poco loco and then some. Crazy as a shithouse mouse, his mother would have said.

Dee started away and Bobby felt his heart cramp. The big boy got to the corner—his buddies were waiting for him on the other side of the street—then wheeled back, made his finger into a gun, and pointed it at Bobby. Bobby grinned and pointed his own back.

“Vaya con Dios, mi amigo loco,” Dee said, then sauntered across the street with the collar of his gang jacket turned up against the back of his neck.

Bobby turned the other way and started walking again, detouring around the pools of light cast by fizzing neon signs and trying to keep in the shadows as much as he could.

Across the street from The Corner Pocket was a mortuary— DESPEGNI FUNERAL PARLOR, it said on the green awning. Hanging in the window was a clock whose face was outlined in a chilly circle of blue neon. Below the clock was a sign which read TIME AND TIDE WAITFOR NO MAN. According to the clock it was twenty past eight. He was still in time, in plenty of time, and he could see an alley beyond the Pocket where he might wait in relative safety, but Bobby couldn’t just park himself and wait, even though he knew that would be the smart thing to do. If he’d really been smart, he never would have come down here in the first place. He wasn’t a wise old owl; he was a scared kid who needed help. He doubted if there was any in The Corner Pocket, but maybe he was wrong.

Bobby walked under the banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE. He had never felt less in need of air conditioning in his life; it was a hot night but he was cold all over.

God, if You’re there, please help me now. Help me to be brave . . . and help me to be lucky.

Bobby opened the door and went in.

The smell of beer was much stronger and much fresher, and the room with the pinball machines in it banged and jangled with lights and noise. Where before only Dee had been playing pinball, there now seemed to be at least two dozen guys, all of them smoking, all of them wearing strap-style undershirts and Frank Sinatra hello-young-lovers hats, all of them with bottles of Bud parked on the glass tops of the Gottlieb machines.

The area by Len Files’s desk was brighter than before because there were more lights on in the bar (where every stool was taken) as well as in the pinball room. The poolhall itself, which had been mostly dark on Wednesday, was now lit like an operating theater. There were men at every table bending and circling and making shots in a blue fog of cigarette smoke; the chairs along the walls were all taken. Bobby could see Old Gee with his feet up on the shoeshine posts, and—

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Bobby turned, startled by the voice and shocked by the sound of that word coming out of a woman’s mouth. It was Alanna Files. The door to the living-room area behind the desk was just swinging shut behind her. Tonight she was wearing a white silk blouse that showed her shoulders—pretty shoulders, creamy-white and as round as breasts—and the top of her prodigious bosom. Below the white blouse were the largest pair of red slacks Bobby had ever seen. Yes-terday, Alanna had been kind, smiling . . . almost laughing at him, in fact, although in a way Bobby hadn’t minded. Tonight she looked scared to death.

“I’m sorry . . . I know I’m not supposed to be in here, but I need to find my friend Ted and I thought . . . thought that . . .” He heard his voice shrinking like a balloon that’s been let loose to fly around the room.

Something was horribly wrong. It was like a dream he sometimes had where he was at his desk studying spelling or science or just read-ing a story and everyone started laughing at him and he realized he had forgotten to put his pants on before coming to school, he was sit-ting at his desk with everything hanging out for everyone to look at, girls and teachers and just everyone.

The beat of the bells in the gameroom hadn’t completely quit, but it had slowed down. The flood of conversation and laughter from the bar had dried up almost entirely. The click of pool and billiard balls had ceased. Bobby looked around, feeling those snakes in his stom-ach again.

They weren’t all looking at him, but most were. Old Gee was star-ing with eyes that looked like holes burned in dirty paper. And although the window in Bobby’s mind was almost opaque now— soaped over—he felt that a lot of the people in here had sort of been expecting him. He doubted if they knew it, and even if they did they wouldn’t know why. They were kind of asleep, like the people of Midwich. The low men had been in. The low men had—

“Get out, Randy,” Alanna said in a dry little whisper. In her distress she had called Bobby by his father’s name. “Get out while you still can.”

Old Gee had slid out of the shoeshine chair. His wrinkled seer-sucker jacket caught on one of the foot-pedestals and tore as he started forward, but he paid no attention as the silk lining floated down beside his knee like a toy parachute. His eyes looked more like burned holes than ever. “Get him,” Old Gee said in a wavery voice. “Get that kid.”

Bobby had seen enough. There was no help here. He scrambled for the door and tore it open. Behind him he had the sense of people starting to move, but slowly. Too slowly.

Bobby Garfield ran out into the night.

He ran almost two full blocks before a stitch in his side forced him to first slow down, then stop. No one was following and that was good, but if Ted went into T he Corner Pocket to collect his money he was finished, done, kaput. It wasn’t just the low men he had to worry about; now there was Old Gee and the rest of them to worry about, too, and Ted didn’t know it. T he question was, what could Bobby do about it?

He looked around and saw the storefronts were gone; he’d come to an area of warehouses. They loomed like giant faces from which most of the features had been erased. There was a smell of fish and sawdust and some vague rotted perfume that might have been old meat.

There was nothing he could do about it. He was just a kid and it was out of his hands. Bobby realized that, but he also realized he couldn’t let Ted walk into T he Corner Pocket without at least trying to warn him. There was nothing Hardy Boys–heroic about this, either; he simply couldn’t leave without making the effort. And it was his mother who had put him in this position. His own mother.

“I hate you, Mom,” he whispered. He was still cold, but sweat was pouring out of his body; every inch of his skin felt wet. “I don’t care what Don Biderman and those other guys did to you, you’re a bitch and I hate you.”

Bobby turned and began to trot back the way he had come, keep-ing to the shadows. Twice he heard people coming and crouched in doorways, making himself small until they had passed by. Making himself small was easy. He had never felt smaller in his life.

This time he turned into the alley. There were garbage cans on one side and a stack of cartons on the other, full of returnable bottles that smelled of beer. This cardboard column was half a foot taller than Bobby, and when he stepped behind it he was perfectly concealed from the street. Once during his wait something hot and furry brushed against his ankle and Bobby started to scream. He stifled most of it before it could get out, looked down, and saw a scruffy alleycat looking back up at him with green headlamp eyes.

“Scat, Pat,” Bobby whispered, and kicked at it. The cat revealed the needles of its teeth, hissed, then did a slow strut back down the alley, weaving around the clots of refuse and strews of broken glass, its tail lifted in what looked like disdain. Through the brick wall beside him Bobby could hear the dull throb of The Corner Pocket’s juke. Mickey and Sylvia were singing “Love Is Strange.” It was strange, all right. A big strange pain in the ass.

From his place of concealment Bobby could no longer see the mortuary clock and he’d lost any sense of how much or how little time was passing. Beyond the beer-and-garbage reek of the alley a summer streetlife opera was going on. People shouted out to each other, some-times laughing, sometimes angry, sometimes in English, sometimes in one of a dozen other languages. There was a rattle of explosions that made him stiffen—gunshots was his first idea—and then he recog-nized the sound as firecrackers, probably ladyfingers, and relaxed a lit-tle again. Cars blasted by, many of them brightly painted railjobs and jackjobs with chrome pipes and glasspack mufflers. Once there was what sounded like a fistfight with people gathered around yelling encouragement to the scufflers. Once a lady who sounded both drunk and sad went by singing “Where the Boys Are” in a beautiful slurry voice. Once there were police sirens which approached and then faded away again.

Bobby didn’t doze, exactly, but fell into a kind of daydream. He and Ted were living on a farm somewhere, maybe in Florida. T hey worked long hours, but Ted could work pretty hard for an old guy, especially now that he had quit smoking and had some of his wind back. Bobby went to school under another name—Ralph Sullivan— and at night they sat on the porch, eating Ted’s cooking and drinking iced tea. Bobby read to him from the newspaper and when they went in to bed they slept deeply and their sleep was peaceful, interrupted by no bad dreams. When they went to the grocery store on Fridays, Bobby would check the bulletin board for lost-pet posters or upside-down file-cards advertising items for sale by owner, but he never found any. T he low men had lost Ted’s scent. Ted was no longer any-one’s dog and they were safe on their farm. Not father and son or grandfather and grandson, but only friends.

Guys like us, Bobby thought drowsily. He was leaning against the brick wall now, his head slipping downward until his chin was almost on his chest. Guys like us, why shouldn’t there be a place for guys like us?

Lights splashed down the alley. Each time this had happened Bobby had peered around the stack of cartons. This time he almost didn’t—he wanted to close his eyes and think about the farm—but he forced himself to look, and what he saw was the stubby yellow tailfin of a Checker cab, just pulling up in front of The Corner Pocket.

Adrenaline flooded Bobby and turned on lights in his head he hadn’t even known about. He dodged around the stack of boxes, spilling the top two off. His foot struck an empty garbage can and knocked it against the wall. He almost stepped on a hissing furry something—the cat again. Bobby kicked it aside and ran out of the alley. As he turned toward The Corner Pocket he slipped on some sort of greasy goo and went down on one knee. He saw the mortuary clock in its cool blue ring: 9:45. The cab was idling at the curb in front of The Corner Pocket’s door. Ted Brautigan was standing beneath the banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE, paying the driver. Bent down to the driver’s open window like that, Ted looked more like Boris Karloff than ever.

Across from the cab, parked in front of the mortuary, was a huge Oldsmobile as red as Alanna’s pants. It hadn’t been there earlier, Bobby was sure of that. Its shape wasn’t quite solid. Looking at it didn’t just make your eyes want to water; it made your mind want to water.

Ted! Bobby tried to yell, but no yell came out—all he could pro-duce was a strawlike whisper. Why doesn’t he feel them? Bobby thought. How come he doesn’t know?

Maybe because the low men could block him out somehow. Or maybe the people inside The Corner Pocket were doing the blocking. Old Gee and all the rest. The low men had perhaps turned them into human sponges that could soak up the warning signals Ted usually felt.

More lights splashed the street. As Ted straightened and the Checker pulled away, the purple DeSoto sprang around the corner. The cab had to swerve to avoid it. Beneath the streetlights the DeSoto looked like a huge blood-clot decorated with chrome and glass. Its headlights were moving and shimmering like lights seen underwater . . . and then they blinked. They weren’t headlights at all. They were eyes.

Ted! Still nothing but that dry whisper came out, and Bobby couldn’t seem to get back on his feet. He was no longer sure he even wanted to get back on his feet. A terrible fear, as disorienting as the flu and as debilitating as a cataclysmic case of the squitters, was enveloping him. Passing the blood-clot DeSoto outside the William Penn Grille had been bad; to be caught in its oncoming eyelights was a thousand times worse. No—a million times.

He was aware that he had torn his pants and scraped blood out of his knee, he could hear Little Richard howling from someone’s upstairs window, and he could still see the blue circle around the mortuary clock like a flashbulb afterimage tattooed on the retina, but none of that seemed real. Nasty Gansett Avenue suddenly seemed no more than a badly painted backdrop. Behind it was some unsuspected reality, and reality was dark.

The DeSoto’s grille was moving. Snarling. Those cars ain’t real

cars, Juan had said. They something else.

They were something else, all right.

“Ted . . .” A little louder this time . . . and Ted heard. He turned toward Bobby, eyes widening, and then the DeSoto bounced up over the curb behind him, its blazing unsteady headlights pinning Ted and making his shadow grow as Bobby’s and the Sigsby girls’ shadows had grown when the pole-light came on in Spicer’s little parking lot.

Ted wheeled back toward the DeSoto, raising one hand to shield his eyes from the glare. More light swept the street. This time it was a Cadillac coming up from the warehouse district, a snot-green Cadillac that looked at least a mile long, a Cadillac with fins like grins and sides that moved like the lobes of a lung. It thumped up over the curb just behind Bobby, stopping less than a foot from his back. Bobby heard a low panting sound. The Cadillac’s motor, he realized, was breathing.

Doors were opening in all three cars. Men were getting out—or things that looked like men at first glance. Bobby counted six, counted eight, stopped counting. Each of them wore a long mustard-colored coat—the kind that was called a duster—and on the right front lapel of each was the staring crimson eye Bobby remembered from his dream. He supposed the red eyes were badges. The crea-tures wearing them were . . . what? Cops? No. A posse, like in a movie? That was a little closer. Vigilantes? Closer still but still not right. They were—

They’re regulators. Like in that movie me and S-J saw at the Empire last year, the one with John Payne and Karen Steele.

That was it—oh yes. The regulators in the movie had turned out to be just a bunch of bad guys, but at first you thought they were ghosts or monsters or something. Bobby thought that these regula-tors really were monsters.

One of them grasped Bobby under the arm. Bobby cried out— the contact was quite the most horrible thing he had ever experi-enced in his life. It made being thrown against the wall by his mother seem like very small change indeed. The low man’s touch was like being grasped by a hot-water bottle that had grown fingers . . . only the feel of them kept shifting. It would feel like fingers in his armpit, then like claws. Fingers . . . claws. Fingers . . . claws. That unspeakable touch buzzed into his flesh, reaching both up and down. It’s Jack’s stick, he thought crazily. The one sharpened at both ends.

Bobby was pulled toward Ted, who was surrounded by the others. He stumbled along on legs that were too weak to walk. Had he thought he would be able to warn Ted? T hat they would run away together down Narragansett Avenue, perhaps even skipping a little, the way Carol used to? That was quite funny, wasn’t it?

Incredibly, Ted didn’t seem afraid. He stood in the semicircle of low men and the only emotion on his face was concern for Bobby. The thing gripping Bobby—now with a hand, now with loathsome pulsing rubber fingers, now with a clutch of talons—suddenly let him go. Bobby staggered, reeled. One of the others uttered a high, barking cry and pushed him in the middle of the back. Bobby flew forward and Ted caught him.

Sobbing with terror, Bobby pressed his face against Ted’s shirt. He could smell the comforting aromas of Ted’s cigarettes and shaving soap, but they weren’t strong enough to cover the stench that was coming from the low men—a meaty, garbagey smell—and a higher smell like burning whiskey that was coming from their cars.

Bobby looked up at Ted. “It was my mother,” he said. “It was my mother who told.”

“This isn’t her fault, no matter what you may think,” Ted replied. “I simply stayed too long.”

“But was it a nice vacation, Ted?” one of the low men asked. His voice had a gruesome buzz, as if his vocal cords were packed with bugs—locusts or maybe crickets. He could have been the one Bobby spoke to on the phone, the one who’d said Ted was their dog . . . but maybe they all sounded the same. If you don’t want to be our dog, too, stay away, the one on the phone had said, but he had come down here anyway, and now . . . oh now . . .

“Wasn’t bad,” Ted replied.

“I hope you at least got laid,” another said, “because you probably won’t get another chance.”

Bobby looked around. The low men stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding them, penning them in their smell of sweat and mag-goty meat, blocking off any sight of the street with their yellow coats. They were dark-skinned, deep-eyed, red-lipped (as if they had been eating cherries) . . . but they weren’t what they looked like. They weren’t what they looked like at all. Their faces wouldn’t stay in their faces, for one thing; their cheeks and chins and hair kept trying to spread outside the lines (it was the only way Bobby could interpret what he was seeing). Beneath their dark skins were skins as white as their pointed reet-petite shoes. But their lips are still red, Bobby thought, their lips are always red. As their eyes were always black, not really eyes at all but caves. And they are so tall, he real-ized. So tall and so thin. There are no thoughts like our thoughts in their brains, no feelings like our feelings in their hearts.

From across the street there came a thick slobbering grunt. Bobby looked in that direction and saw that one of the Oldsmobile’s tires had turned into a blackish-gray tentacle. It reached out, snared a cig-arette wrapper, and pulled it back. A moment later the tentacle was a tire again, but the cigarette wrapper was sticking out of it like something half swallowed.

“Ready to come back, hoss?” one of the low men asked Ted. He bent toward him, the folds of his yellow coat rustling stiffly, the red eye on the lapel staring. “Ready to come back and do your duty?”

“I’ll come,” Ted replied, “but the boy stays here.”

More hands settled on Bobby, and something like a living branch caressed the nape of his neck. It set off that buzzing again, something that was both an alarm and a sickness. It rose into his head and hummed there like a hive. Within that lunatic hum he heard first one bell, tolling rapidly, then many. A world of bells in some terrible black night of hot hurricane winds. He supposed he was sensing wherever the low men had come from, an alien place trillions of miles from Connecticut and his mother. Villages were burning under unknown constellations, people were screaming, and that touch on his neck . . . that awful touch . . .

Bobby moaned and buried his head against Ted’s chest again.

“He wants to be with you,” an unspeakable voice crooned. “I think we’ll bring him, Ted. He has no natural ability as a Breaker, but still . . . all things serve the King, you know.” The unspeakable fingers caressed again.

“All things serve the Beam,” Ted said in a dry, correcting voice. His teacher’s voice.

“Not for much longer,” the low man said, and laughed. The sound of it loosened Bobby’s bowels.

“Bring him,” said another voice. It held a note of command. They did all sound sort of alike, but this was the one he had spoken to on the phone; Bobby was sure.

“No!” Ted said. His hands tightened on Bobby’s back. “He stays here!”

“Who are you to give us orders?” the low man in charge asked. “How proud you have grown during your little time of freedom, Ted! How haughty! Yet soon you’ll be back in the same room where you have spent so many years, with the others, and if I say the boy comes, then the boy comes.”

“If you bring him, you’ll have to go on taking what you need from me,” Ted said. His voice was very quiet but very strong. Bobby hugged him as tight as he could and shut his eyes. He didn’t want to look at the low men, not ever again. The worst thing about them was that their touch was like Ted’s, in a way: it opened a window. But who would want to look through such a window? Who would want to see the tall, red-lipped scissor-shapes as they really were? Who would want to see the owner of that red Eye?

“You’re a Breaker, Ted. You were made for it, born to it. And if we tell you to break, you’ll break, by God.”

“You can force me, I’m not so foolish as to think you can’t . . . but if you leave him here, I’ll give what I have to you freely. And I have more to give than you could . . . well, perhaps you could imagine it.”

“I want the boy,” the low man in charge said, but now he sounded thoughtful. Perhaps even doubtful. “I want him as a pretty, some-thing to give the King.”

“I doubt if the Crimson King will thank you for a meaningless pretty if it interferes with his plans,” Ted said. “T here is a gunslinger—”

“Gunslinger, pah!”

“Yet he and his friends have reached the borderland of End-World,” Ted said, and now he was the one who sounded thoughtful. “If I give you what you want instead of forcing you to take it, I may be able to speed things up by fifty years or more. As you say, I’m a Breaker, made for it and born to it. There aren’t many of us. You need every one, and most of all you need me. Because I’m the best.”

“You flatter yourself . . . and you overestimate your importance to the King.”

“Do I? I wonder. Until the Beams break, the Dark Tower stands— surely I don’t need to remind you of that. Is one boy worth the risk?”

Bobby hadn’t the slightest idea what Ted was talking about and didn’t care. All he knew was that the course of his life was being decided on the sidewalk outside a Bridgeport billiard parlor. He could hear the rustle of the low men’s coats; he could smell them; now that Ted had touched him again he could feel them even more clearly. That horrible itching behind his eyes had begun again, too. In a weird way it harmonized with the buzzing in his head. The black specks drifted across his vision and he was suddenly sure what they meant, what they were for. In Clifford Simak’s book Ring Around the Sun, it was a top that took you off into other worlds; you fol-lowed the rising spirals. In truth, Bobby suspected, it was the specks that did it. The black specks. They were alive . . .

And they were hungry.

“Let the boy decide,” the leader of the low men said at last. His liv-ing branch of a finger caressed the back of Bobby’s neck again. “He loves you so much, Teddy. You’re his te-ka. Aren’t you? That means destiny’s friend, Bobby-O. Isn’t that what this old smoky-smelling Teddy-bear is to you? Your destiny’s friend?”

Bobby said nothing, only pressed his cold throbbing face against Ted’s shirt. He now repented coming here with all his heart—would have stayed home hiding under his bed if he had known the truth of the low men—but yes, he supposed Ted was his te-ka. He didn’t know about stuff like destiny, he was only a kid, but Ted was his friend. Guys like us, Bobby thought miserably. Guys like us.

“So how do you feel now that you see us?” the low man asked. “Would you like to come with us so you can be close to good old Ted? Perhaps see him on the odd weekend? Discuss literature with your dear old te-ka? Learn to eat what we eat and drink what we drink?” The awful fingers again, caressing. The buzzing in Bobby’s head increased. The black specks fattened and now they looked like fin-gers—beckoning fingers. “We eat it hot, Bobby,” the low man whis-pered. “And drink it hot as well. Hot . . . and sweet. Hot . . . and sweet.”

“Stop it,” Ted snapped.

“Or would you rather stay with your mother?” the crooning voice went on, ignoring Ted. “Surely not. Not a boy of your principles. Not a boy who has discovered the joys of friendship and literature. Surely you’ll come with this wheezy old ka-mai, won’t you? Or will you? Decide, Bobby. Do it now, and knowing that what you decide is what will bide. Now and forever.”

Bobby had a delirious memory of the lobsterback cards blurring beneath McQuown’s long white fingers: Now they go, now they slow, now they rest, here’s the test.

I fail, Bobby thought. I fail the test.

“Let me go, mister,” he said miserably. “Please don’t take me with you.”

“Even if it means your te-ka has to go on without your wonderful and revivifying company?” The voice was smiling, but Bobby could almost taste the knowing contempt under its cheery surface, and he shivered. With relief, because he understood he was probably going to be let free after all, with shame because he knew what he was doing—crawling, chintzing, chickening out. All the things the good guys in the movies and books he loved never did. But the good guys in the movies and books never had to face anything like the low men in the yellow coats or the horror of the black specks. And what Bobby saw of those things here, outside The Corner Pocket, was not the worst of it either. What if he saw the rest? What if the black specks drew him into a world where he saw the men in the yellow coats as they really were? What if he saw the shapes inside the ones they wore in this world?

“Yes,” he said, and began to cry.

“Yes what?”

“Even if he has to go without me.”

“Ah. And even if it means going back to your mother?”

“Yes.”

“You perhaps understand your bitch of a mother a little better now, do you?”

“Yes,” Bobby said for the third time. By now he was nearly moan-ing. “I guess I do.”

“That’s enough,” Ted said. “Stop it.”

But the voice wouldn’t. Not yet. “You’ve learned how to be a cow-ard, Bobby . . . haven’t you?”

“Yes!” he cried, still with his face against Ted’s shirt. “A baby, a little chickenshit baby, yes yes yes! I don’t care! Just let me go home!” He drew in a great long unsteady breath and let it out in a scream. “I WANT MYMOTHER!” It was the howl of a terrified littlun who has finally glimpsed the beast from the water, the beast from the air.

“All right,” the low man said. “Since you put it that way. Assum-ing your Teddy-bear confirms that he’ll go to work with a will and not have to be chained to his oar as previously.”

“I promise.” Ted let go of Bobby. Bobby remained as he was, clutching Ted with panicky tightness and pushing his face against Ted’s chest, until Ted pushed him gently away.

“Go inside the poolhall, Bobby. Tell Files to give you a ride home. Tell him if he does that, my friends will leave him alone.”

“I’m sorry, Ted. I wanted to come with you. I meant to come with you. But I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be hard on yourself.” But Ted’s look was heavy, as if he knew that from tonight on Bobby would be able to be nothing else.

Two of the yellowcoats grasped Ted’s arms. Ted looked at the one standing behind Bobby—the one who had been caressing the nape of Bobby’s neck with that horrible sticklike finger. “They don’t need to do that, Cam. I’ll walk.”

“Let him go,” Cam said. The low men holding Ted released his arms. Then, for the last time, Cam’s finger touched the back of Bobby’s neck. Bobby uttered a choked wail. He thought, If he does it again I’ll go crazy, I won’t be able to help it. I’ll start to scream and I won’t be able to stop. Even if my head bursts open I’ll go on scream-ing. “Get inside there, little boy. Do it before I change my mind and take you anyway.”

Bobby stumbled toward The Corner Pocket. The door stood open but empty. He climbed the single step, then turned back. Three of the low men were clustered around Ted, but Ted was walking toward the blood-clot DeSoto on his own.

“Ted!”

Ted turned, smiled, started to wave. T hen the one called Cam leaped forward, seized him, whirled him, and thrust him into the car. As Cam swung the DeSoto’s back door shut Bobby saw, for just an instant, an incredibly tall, incredibly scrawny being standing inside a long yellow coat, a thing with flesh as white as new snow and lips as red as fresh blood. Deep in its eyesockets were savage points of light and dancing flecks of darkness in pupils which swelled and contracted as Ted’s had done. T he red lips peeled back, revealing needly teeth that put the alleycat’s to shame. A black tongue lolled out from between those teeth and wagged an obscene goodbye. Then the crea-ture in the yellow coat sprinted around the hood of the purple DeSoto, thin legs gnashing, thin knees pumping, and plunged in behind the wheel. Across the street the Olds started up, its engine sounding like the roar of an awakening dragon. Perhaps it was a dragon. From its place skewed halfway across the sidewalk, the Cadillac’s engine did the same. Living headlights flooded this part of Narragansett Avenue in a pulsing glare. The DeSoto skidded in a U-turn, one fenderskirt scraping up a brief train of sparks from the street, and for a moment Bobby saw Ted’s face in the DeSoto’s back window. Bobby raised his hand and waved. He thought Ted raised his own in return but could not be sure. Once more his head filled with a sound like hoofbeats. He never saw Ted Brautigan again.

“Bug out, kid,” Len Files said. His face was cheesy-white, seeming to hang off his skull the way the flesh hung off his sister’s upper arms. Behind him the lights of the Gottlieb machines in the little arcade flashed and flickered with no one to watch them; the cool cats who made an evening specialty of Corner Pocket pinball were clustered behind Len Files like children. To Len’s right were the pool and bil-liard players, many of them clutching cues like clubs. Old Gee stood off to one side by the cigarette machine. He didn’t have a pool-cue; from one gnarled old hand there hung a small automatic pistol. It didn’t scare Bobby. After Cam and his yellowcoat friends, he didn’t think anything would have the power to scare him right now. For the time being he was all scared out.

“Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, kid. Now.”

“Better do it, kiddo.” That was Alanna, standing behind the desk. Bobby glanced at her and thought, If I was older I bet I’d give you something. I bet I would. She saw his glance—the quality of his glance—and looked away, flushed and frightened and confused.

Bobby looked back at her brother. “You want those guys back here?”

Len’s hanging face grew even longer. “You kidding?”

“Okay then,” Bobby said. “Give me what I want and I’ll go away. You’ll never see me again.” He paused. “Or them.”

“Whatchu want, kid?” Old Gee asked in his wavering voice. Bobby was going to get whatever he asked for; it was flashing in Old Gee’s mind like a big bright sign. That mind was as clear now as it had been when it had belonged to Young Gee, cold and calculating and unpleasant, but it seemed innocent after Cam and his regulators. Innocent as ice cream.

“A ride home,” Bobby said. “That’s number one.” Then—speak-ing to Old Gee rather than Len—he gave them number two.

Len’s car was a Buick: big, long, and new. Vulgar but not low. Just a car. The two of them rode to the sound of danceband music from the forties. Len spoke only once during the trip to Harwich. “Don’t you go tuning that to no rock and roll. I have to listen to enough of that shit at work.”

They drove past the Asher Empire, and Bobby saw there was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Brigitte Bardot standing to the left of the ticket booth. He glanced at it without very much interest. He felt too old for B.B. now.

They turned off Asher; the Buick slipped down Broad Street Hill like a whisper behind a cupped hand. Bobby pointed out his build-ing. Now the apartment was lit up, all right; every light was blazing. Bobby looked at the clock on the Buick’s dashboard and saw it was almost eleven P.M.

As the Buick pulled to the curb Len Files found his tongue again. “Who were they, kid? Who were those gonifs?”

Bobby almost grinned. It reminded him of how, at the end of almost every Lone Ranger episode, someone said Who was that masked man?

“Low men,” he told Len. “Low men in yellow coats.”

“I wouldn’t want to be your pal right now.”

“No,” Bobby said. A shudder shook through him like a gust of wind. “Me neither. Thanks for the ride.”

“Don’t mention it. Just stay the fuck clear of my felts and greens from now on. You’re banned for life.”

The Buick—a boat, a Detroit cabin-cruiser, but not low—drew away. Bobby watched as it turned in a driveway across the street and then headed back up the hill past Carol’s building. When it had dis-appeared around the corner, Bobby looked up at the stars—stacked billions, a spilled bridge of light. Stars and more stars beyond them, spinning in the black.

There is a Tower, he thought. It holds everything together. There are Beams that protect it somehow. There is a Crimson King, and Breakers working to destroy the Beams . . . not because the Breakers want to but because it wants them to. The Crimson King.

Was Ted back among the rest of the Breakers yet? Bobby wondered. Back and pulling his oar?

I’m sorry, he thought, starting up the walk to the porch. He remembered sitting there with Ted, reading to him from the newspa-per. Just a couple of guys. I wanted to go with you but I couldn’t. In the end I couldn’t.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, listening for Bowser around on Colony Street. There was nothing. Bowser had gone to sleep. It was a miracle. Smiling wanly, Bobby got moving again. His mother must have heard the creak of the second porch step—it was pretty loud—because she cried out his name and then there was the sound of her running footsteps. He was on the porch when the door flew open and she ran out, still dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she came home from Providence. Her hair hung around her face in wild curls and tangles.

“Bobby!” she cried. “Bobby, oh Bobby! Thank God! Thank God!”

She swept him up, turning him around and around in a kind of dance, her tears wetting one side of his face.

“I wouldn’t take their money,” she babbled. “They called me back and asked for the address so they could send a check and I said never mind, it was a mistake, I was hurt and upset, I said no, Bobby, I said no, I said I didn’t want their money.”

Bobby saw she was lying. Someone had pushed an envelope with her name on it under the foyer door. Not a check, three hundred dol-lars in cash. Three hundred dollars for the return of their best Breaker; three hundred lousy rocks. They were even bigger cheap-skates than she was.

“I said I didn’t want it, did you hear me?”

Carrying him into the apartment now. He weighed almost a hun-dred pounds and was too heavy for her but she carried him anyway. As she babbled on, Bobby realized they wouldn’t have the police to con-tend with, at least; she hadn’t called them. Mostly she had just been sitting here, plucking at her wrinkled skirt and praying incoherently that he would come home. She loved him. That beat in her mind like the wings of a bird trapped in a barn. She loved him. It didn’t help much . . . but it helped a little. Even if it was a trap, it helped a little.

“I said I didn’t want it, we didn’t need it, they could keep their money. I said . . . I told them . . .”

“That’s good, Mom,” he said. “That’s good. Put me down.”

“Where have you been? Are you all right? Are you hungry?”

He answered her questions back to front. “I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m fine. I went to Bridgeport. I got this.”

He reached into his pants pocket and brought out the remains of the Bike Fund money. His ones and change were mixed into a messy green wad of tens and twenties and fifties. His mother stared at the money as it rained down on the endtable by the sofa, her good eye growing big-ger and bigger until Bobby was afraid it might tumble right out of her face. The other eye remained squinched down in its thundercloud of blue-black flesh. She looked like a battered old pirate gloating over freshly unburied treasure, an image Bobby could have done without . . . and one which never entirely left him during the fifteen years between that night and the night of her death. Yet some new and not particu-larly pleasant part of him enjoyed that look—how it rendered her old and ugly and comic, a person who was stupid as well as avaricious. That’s my ma, he thought in a Jimmy Durante voice. That’s my ma. We both gave him up, but I got paid better than you did, Ma, didn’t I? Yeah! Hotcha!

“Bobby,” she whispered in a trembly voice. She looked like a pirate and sounded like a winning contestant on that Bill Cullen show, The Price Is Right. “Oh Bobby, so much money! Where did it come from?”

“Ted’s bet,” Bobby said. “T his is the payout.”

“But Ted . . . won’t he—”

“He won’t need it anymore.”

Liz winced as if one of her bruises had suddenly twinged. Then she began sweeping the money together, sorting the bills even as she did so. “I’m going to get you that bike,” she said. Her fingers moved with the speed of an experienced three-card monte dealer. No one beats that shuffle, Bobby thought. No one has ever beaten that shuffle. “First thing in the morning. Soon as the Western Auto opens. Then we’ll— ”

“I don’t want a bike,” he said. “Not from that. And not from you.”

She froze with her hands full of money and he felt her rage bloom at once, something red and electrical. “No thanks from you, are there? I was a fool to ever expect any. God damn you if you’re not the spitting image of your father!” She drew back her hand again with the fingers open. The difference this time was that he knew it was coming. She had blindsided him for the last time.

“How would you know?” Bobby asked. “You’ve told so many lies about him you don’t remember the truth.”

And this was so. He had looked into her and there was almost no Randall Garfield there, only a box with his name on it . . . his name and a faded image that could have been almost anyone. This was the box where she kept the things that hurt her. She didn’t remember about how he liked that Jo Stafford song; didn’t remember (if she had ever known) that Randy Garfield had been a real sweetie who’d give you the shirt right off his back. There was no room for things like that in the box she kept. Bobby thought it must be awful to need a box like that.

“He wouldn’t buy a drunk a drink,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can’t make me hate him . . . and you can’t make me into him.” He turned his right hand into a fist and cocked it by the side of his head. “I won’t be his ghost. Tell yourself as many lies as you want to about the bills he didn’t pay and the insurance policy he lost out on and all the inside straights he tried to fill, but don’t tell them to me. Not anymore.”

“Don’t raise your hand to me, Bobby-O. Don’t you ever raise your hand to me.”

In answer he held up his other hand, also fisted. “Come on. You want to hit me? I’ll hit you back. You can have some more. Only this time you’ll deserve it. Come on.”

She faltered. He could feel her rage dissipating as fast as it had come, and what replaced it was a terrible blackness. In it, he saw, was fear. Fear of her son, fear that he might hurt her. Not tonight, no— not with those grimy little-boy fists. But little boys grew up.

And was he so much better than her that he could look down his nose and give her the old la-de-dah? Was he any better? In his mind he heard the unspeakable crooning voice asking if he wanted to go back home even though it meant Ted would have to go on without him. Yes, Bobby had said. Even if it meant going back to his bitch of a mother? Yes, Bobby had said. You understand her a little bit better now, do you? Cam had asked, and once again Bobby had said yes.

And when she recognized his step on the porch, there had at first been nothing in her mind but love and relief. Those things had been real.

Bobby unmade his fists. He reached up and took her hand, which was still held back to slap . . . although now without much convic-tion. It resisted at first, but Bobby at last soothed the tension from it. He kissed it. He looked at his mother’s battered face and kissed her hand again. He knew her so well and he didn’t want to. He longed for the window in his mind to close, longed for the opacity that made love not just possible but necessary. The less you knew, the more you could believe.

“It’s just a bike I don’t want,” he said. “Okay? Just a bike.”

“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was uncertain, dreary. “What do you want from me, Bobby?”

“Pancakes,” he said. “Lots.” He tried a smile. “I am so-ooo hungry.”

She made enough pancakes for both of them and they ate break-fast at midnight, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. He insisted on helping her with the dishes even though it was going on toward one by then. Why not? he asked her. There was no school the next day, he could sleep as late as he wanted.

As she was letting the water out of the sink and Bobby was putting the last of their silverware away, Bowser began barking over on Colony Street: roop-roop-roop into the dark of a new day. Bobby’s eyes met his mother’s, they laughed, and for a moment knowing was all right.

At first he lay in bed the old way, on his back with his heels spread to the lower corners of the mattress, but the old way no longer felt right. It felt exposed, as if anything that wanted to bag a boy could simply burst out of his closet and unzip his upturned belly with one claw. He rolled over on his side and wondered where Ted was now. He reached out, feeling for something that might be Ted, and there was nothing. Just as there had been nothing earlier, on Nasty Gansett Street. Bobby wished he could cry for Ted, but he couldn’t. Not yet.

Outside, crossing the dark like a dream, came the sound of the clock in the town square: one single bong. Bobby looked at the lumi-nous hands of the Big Ben on his desk and saw they were standing at one o’clock. That was good.

“They’re gone,” Bobby said. “The low men are gone.”

But he slept on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest. His nights of sleeping wide open on his back were over.