Hearts in Atlantis(47)

'I don't know. She didn't know. Or perhaps she has covered over what she knows and what she fears with what she hopes. I can't say. Sometimes I can - sometimes I know things very directly and clearly. The first moment I saw you I knew that you wanted a bicycle, that getting one was very important to you, and you meant to earn the money for one this summer if you could. I admired your determination.'

'You touched me on purpose, didn't you?'

'Yes indeed. The first time, anyway. I did it to know you a little. But friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too. Besides, when I touch, I pass on a kind of - well, a kind of window. I think you know that. The second time I touched you . . . really touching, holding on, you know what I mean . . . that was a mistake, but not such an awful one; for a little while you knew more than you should, but it wore off, didn't it? If I'd gone on, though . . . touching and touching, the way people do when they're close . . . there'd come a point where things would change. Where it wouldn't wear off.' He raised his mostly smoked cigarette and looked at it distastefully. 'The way you smoke one too many of these and you're hooked for life.'

'Is my mother all right now?' Bobby asked, knowing that Ted couldn't tell him that; Ted's gift, whatever it was, didn't stretch that far.

'I don't know. I - '

Ted suddenly stiffened. He was looking out the window at something up ahead. He smashed his cigarette into the armrest ashtray, doing it hard enough to send sparks scattering across the back of his hand. He didn't seem to feel them. 'Christ,' he said. 'Oh Christ, Bobby, we're in for it.'

Bobby leaned across his lap to look out the window, thinking in the back of his mind about what Ted had just been saying - touching and touching, the way people do when they're close - even as he peered up Asher Avenue.

Ahead was a three-way intersection, Asher Avenue, Bridgeport Avenue, and the Connecticut Pike all coming together at a place known as Puritan Square. Trolley-tracks gleamed in the afternoon sun; delivery trucks honked impatiently as they waited their turns to dart through the crush. A sweating policeman with a whistle in his mouth and white gloves on his hands was directing traffic. Off to the left was the William Penn Grille, a famous restaurant which was supposed to have the best steaks in Connecticut (Mr Biderman had taken the whole office staff there after the agency sold the Waverley Estate, and Bobby's mom had come home with about a dozen William Penn Grille books of matches). Its main claim to fame, his mom had once told Bobby, was that the bar was over the Harwich town line, but the restaurant proper was in Bridgeport.

Parked in front, on the very edge of Puritan Square, was a DeSoto automobile of a purple Bobby had never seen before - had never even suspected. The color was so bright it hurt his eyes to look at it. It hurt his whole head.

Their cars will be like their yellow coats and sharp shoes and the greasy perfumed stuff they use to slick back their hair: hud and vulgar.

The purple car was loaded with swoops and darts of chrome. It had fenderskirts. The hood ornament was huge; Chief DeSoto's head glittered in the hazy light like a fake jewel. The tires were fat whitewalls and the hubcaps were spinners. There was a whip antenna on the back. From its tip there hung a raccoon tail.

'The low men,' Bobby whispered. There was really no question. It was a DeSoto, but at the same time it was like no car he had ever seen in his life, something as alien as an asteroid. As they drew closer to the clogged three-way intersection, Bobby saw the upholstery was a metallic dragonfly-green - the color nearly howled in contrast to the car's purple skin. There was white fur around the steering wheel. 'Holy crow, it's them!'

'You have to take your mind away,' Ted said. He grabbed Bobby by the shoulders (up front the Yankees blared on and on, the driver paying his two fares in the back seat no attention whatsoever, thank God for that much, at least) and shook him once, hard, before letting him go. 'You have to take your mind away, do you understand?'

He did. George Sanders had built a brick wall behind which to hide his thoughts and plans from the Children. Bobby had used Maury Wills once before, but he didn't think baseball was going to cut it this time. What would?

Bobby could see the Asher Empire's marquee jutting out over the sidewalk, three or four blocks beyond Puritan Square, and suddenly he could hear the sound of Sully-John's Bo lo Bouncer: whap-whap-whap. If she's trash, S-J had said, I'd love to be the trashman.

The poster they'd seen that day filled Bobby's mind: Brigitte Bardot (the French sex-kitten was what the papers called her) dressed only in a towel and a smile. She looked a little like the woman getting out of the car on one of the calendars back at The Corner Pocket, the one with most of her skirt in her lap and her garters showing. Brigitte Bardot was prettier, though. And she was real. She was too old for the likes of Bobby Garfield, of course.

(I'm so young and you're so old, Paul Anka singing from a thousand transistor radios, this my darling I've been told] but she was still beautiful, and a cat could look at a queen, his mother always said that, too: a cat could look at a queen. Bobby saw her more and more clearly as he settled back against the seat, his eyes taking on that drifty, far-off look Ted's eyes got when he had one of his blank-outs; Bobby saw her shower-damp puff of blond hair, the slope of her br**sts into the towel, her long thighs, her painted toenails standing over the words Adults Only, Must Have Driver's License or Birth Certificate. He could smell her soap - something light and flowery. He could smell