Hearts in Atlantis(19)

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

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

But -

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stopped in at Spicer's for a penny gumball and gleeped the bulletin board, which was dominated by photos of this year's Miss Rhenigold candidates. He saw two cards offering cars for sale by owner, but neither was upside down. There was another one that

Said MUST SELL MY BACK YARD POOL, GOOD SHAPE, YOUR KINDS WILL LOVE IT, and that one was crooked, but Bobby didn't guess crooked counted.

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

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

'Are the commie agents after the plans?' she asked.

'Huh?'

'You keep staring everywhere. Even behind you.'

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

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

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

'I'm looking for guys from St Gabe's, that's all,' Bobby said.

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