Hearts in Atlantis(170)

'You think?'

'Absolutely.'

A dark-haired, brown-eyed woman in a blue dress peeked around the corner and said, 'So there you are.'

Dieffenbaker stood up as she came toward them, walking slow and pretty on her high heels. Sully stood up, too.

'Mary, this is John Sullivan. He served with me and Pags. Sully, this is my good friend Mary Theresa Charlton.'

'Pleased to meet you,' Sully said, and put out his hand.

Her grip was firm and sure, long, cool fingers in his own, but she was looking at Dieffenbaker. 'Mrs Pagano wants to see you, hon. Please?'

'You bet,' Dieffenbaker said. He started toward the Front of the building, then turned back to Sully. 'Hang in a little bit,' he said. 'We'll go for a drink. I promise not to preach.' But his eyes shifted from Sully's when he said this, as if they knew it was a promise he couldn't keep.

'Thanks, Loot, but I really ought to get back. I want to beat the rush-hour traffic.'

But he hadn't beaten the traffic after all and now a piano was Falling toward him, gleaming in the sun and humming to itself as it came. Sully Fell flat on his stomach and rolled under a car. The piano came down less than five feet away, detonating and throwing up rows of keys like teeth.

Sully slid back out from beneath the car, burning his back on the hot tailpipe, and struggled to his feet. He looked north along the turnpike, eyes wide and unbelieving. A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: tape recorders and rugs and a riding lawnmower with the grass-caked blade whirling in its housing and a black lawn-jockey and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it. He saw an old man with a lot of theatrical gray hair running up the breakdown lane and then a flight of steps fell on him, tearing off his left arm and sending him to his knees. There were clocks and desks and coffee tables and a plummeting elevator with its cable uncoiling into the air behind it like a greasy severed umbilicus. A squall of ledgers fell in the parking lot of a nearby industrial complex; their clapping covers sounded like applause. A fur coat fell on a running woman, trapping her, and then a sofa landed on her, crushing her. The air filled with a storm of light as large panes of greenhouse glass dropped out of the blue. A statue of a Civil War soldier smashed through a panel truck. An ironing board hit the railing of the overpass up ahead and then fell into the stalled traffic below like a spinning propeller. A stuffed lion dropped into the back of a pickup truck. Everywhere were running, screaming people. Everywhere were cars with dented roofs and smashed windows; Sully saw a Mercedes with the unnaturally pink legs of a department-store mannequin sticking up from the sunroof. The air shook with whines and whistles.

Another shadow fell on him and even as he ducked and raised his hand he knew it was too late, if it was an iron or a toaster or something like that it would fracture his skull. If it was something bigger he'd be nothing but a grease-spot on the highway.

The falling object struck his hand without hurting it in the slightest, bounced, and landed at his feet. He looked down at it first with surprise, then with dawning wonder. 'Holy shit,' he said.

Sully bent over and picked up the baseball glove which had fallen from the sky, recognizing it at once even after all these years: the deep scratch down the last finger and the comically tangled knots in the rawhide laces of the webbing were as good as fingerprints. He looked on the side, where Bobby had printed his name. It was still there, but the letters looked fresher than they should have, and the leather here looked frayed and faded and whipsawed, as if other names had been inked in the same spot and then erased.

Closer to his face, the smell of the glove was both intoxicating and irresistible. Sully slipped it onto his hand, and when he did something crackled beneath his little finger - a piece of paper shoved in there. He paid no attention. Instead he put the glove over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Leather and neat's-foot oil and sweat and grass. All the summers that were. The summer of 1960, for instance, when he had come back from his week at camp to find everything changed - Bobby sullen, Carol distant and palely thoughtful (at least for awhile), and the cool old guy who'd lived on the third floor of Bobby's building - Ted - gone. Everything had changed . . . but it was still summer, he had still been eleven, and everything had still seemed . . .

'Eternal,' he murmured into the glove, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with butterflies shattered on the roof of a bread-van and a stop-sign stuck, quivering, into the breakdown lane like a thrown spear. Sully remembered his Bo-lo Bouncer and his black Keds and the taste of Fez straight out of the gun, how the pieces of candy would hit the roof of your mouth and then ricochet onto your tongue; he remembered the way his catcher's mask felt when it sat on his face just right and the hisha-hisha-hisha of the lawn-sprinklers on Broad Street and how mad Mrs Conlan got if you walked too close to her precious flowers and Mrs Godlow at the Asher Empire wanting to see your birth certificate if she thought you were too big to be still under twelve and the poster of Brigitte Bardot

(if she's trash I'd love to be the trashman)

in her towel and playing guns and playing pass and playing Careers and making arm-farts in the back of Mrs Sweetser's fourth-grade classroom and-

'Hey, American.' Only she said it Amellican and Sully knew who he was going to see even before he raised his head from Bobby's Ah/in Dark-model glove. It was old mamasan, standing there between the crotchrocket, which had been crushed by a freezer (wrapped meat was spilling out of its shattered door in frosty blocks), and a Subaru with a lawn-flamingo punched through its roof. Old mamasan in her green pants and orange smock and red sneakers, old mamasan lit up like a bar-sign in hell.