Hearts in Atlantis(13)

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

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

'What was weird about them?'

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

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

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

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

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

'One feels them first in the back of one's eyes,' he said in a conversational tone. He spoke clearly; Bobby heard every word.

'Feels what?'

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

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

'No . . . no, that's okay.'

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

'Tell me what he said about the ending. Mr Golding.'

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

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

'No?'

'No.'

'Never?'

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

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

'Okay.'

''Lord of the Flies wasn't much like the Hardy Boys, was it?'

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

'No,' he said, 'it sure wasn't.'

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

'Yes.'

'Terrific. Now tell me - would you like to earn a dollar a week from me?'

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

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