Hearts in Atlantis(20)

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

'Don't swear,' Carol said, and elbowed him again.

Sully-John looked wounded. 'Who swore? I didn't swear.'

'Yes you did.'

'I did not, Carol.'

'Did.'

'No sir, did not.'

'Yes sir, did too, you said dinkberries.'

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

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

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

'Me Carol, you Jughead. Here.' Carol thrust three books - arithmetic, Adventures in Spelling, and The Little House on the Prairie - into S-J's hands. 'Carry my books cause you swore.'

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

'It's pennants,' Carol said.

'What the heck is pennants?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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