Hearts in Atlantis(56)
(OR)
BRING to THE WILLIAM PENN GRILLE!
Ask for THE LOW MEN IN THE YELLOW COATS!
Motto: 'WE EAT IT RARE!'
His mom saw the poster, too, and this time when her ankles banged together she did fall.
Get up, Mom! Bobby screamed, but she didn't - perhaps couldn't. She crawled along the brown carpet instead, looking over her shoulder as she went, her hair hanging across her cheeks and forehead in sweaty clumps. The back of her dress had been torn away, and Bobby could see her bare burn - her underpants were gone. Worse, the backs of her thighs were splashed with blood. What had they done to her? Dear God, what had they done to his mother?
Don Biderman came around the corner ahead of her - he had found a shortcut and cut her off. The others were right behind him. Now Mr Biderman's prick was standing straight up the way Bobby's sometimes did in the morning before he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Only Mr Biderman's prick was huge, it looked like a kraken, a triffid, a monstah, and Bobby thought he understood the blood on his mother's legs. He didn't want to but he thought he did.
Leave her alone! he tried to scream at Mr Biderman. Leave her alone, haven't you done enough?
The scarlet eye on Mr Biderman's yellow doublet suddenly opened wider . . . and slithered to one side. Bobby was invisible, his body one world farther down the spinning top from this one . . . but the red eye saw him. The red eye saw everything.
'Kill the pig, drink her blood,' Mr Biderman said in a thick, almost unrecognizable voice, and started forward.
'Kill the pig, drink her blood,' Bill Cushman and Curtis Dean chimed in.
'Kill the pig, strew her guts, eat her flesh,' chanted Willie and Richie, falling in behind the nimrods. Like those of the men, their pricks had turned into spears.
'Eat her, drink her, strew her, screw her,' Harry chimed in.
Get up, Mom! Run! Don't let them!
She tried. But even as she struggled from her knees to her feet, Biderman leaped at her. The others followed, closing in, and as their hands began to tear the tatters of her clothes from her body Bobby thought: I want to get out of here, I want to go back down the top to my own world, make it stop and spin it the other way so I can go back down to my own room in my own world . . .
Except it wasn't a top, and even as the images of the dream began to break up and go dark, Bobby knew it. It wasn't a top but a tower, a still spindle upon which all of existence moved and spun. Then it was gone and for a little while there was a merciful nothingness. When he opened his eyes, his bedroom was full of sunshine - summer sunshine on a Thursday morning in the last June of the Eisenhower Presidency.
9
Ugly Thursday.
CHAPTER 11
One thing you could say about Ted Brautigan: he knew how to cook. The breakfast he slid in front of Bobby- lightly scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon - was a lot better than anything his mother ever made for breakfast (her specialty was huge, tasteless pancakes which the two of them drowned in Aunt Jemima's syrup), and as good as anything you could get at the Colony Diner or the Harwich. The only problem was that Bobby didn't feel like eating. He couldn't remember the details of his dream, but he knew it had been a nightmare, and that he must have cried at some point while it was going on - when he woke up, his pillow had been damp. Yet the dream wasn't the only reason he felt flat and depressed this morning; dreams, after all, weren't real. Ted's going away would be real. And would be forever.
'Are you leaving right from The Corner Pocket?' Bobby asked as Ted sat down across from him with his own plate of eggs and bacon. 'You are, aren't you?'
'Yes, that will be safest.' He began to eat, but slowly and with no apparent enjoyment. So he was feeling bad, too. Bobby was glad. 'I'll say to your mother that my brother in Illinois is ill. That's all she needs to know.'
'Are you going to take the Big Gray Dog?'
Ted smiled briefly. 'Probably the train. I'm quite the wealthy man, remember.'
'Which train?'
'It's better if you don't know the details, Bobby. What you don't know you can't tell. Or be made to tell.'
Bobby considered this briefly, then asked, 'You'll remember the postcards?'
Ted picked up a piece of bacon, then put it down again. 'Postcards, plenty of postcards. I promise. Now don't let's talk about it anymore.'
'What should we talk about, then?'
Ted thought about it, then smiled. His smile was sweet and open; when he smiled, Bobby could see what he must have looked like when he was twenty, and strong.
'Books, of course,' Ted said. 'We'll talk about books.'
It was going to be a crushingly hot day, that was clear by nine o'clock. Bobby helped with the dishes, drying and putting away, and then they sat in the living room, where Ted's fan did its best to circulate the already tired air, and they talked about books . . . or rather Ted talked about books. And this morning, without the distraction of the Albini-Haywood fight, Bobby listened hungrily. He didn't understand all of what Ted was saying, but he understood enough to realize that books made their own world, and that the Harwich Public Library wasn't it. The library was nothing but the doorway to that world.
Ted talked of William Golding and what he called 'dystopian fantasy,' went on to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, suggesting a link between the Morlocks and the Eloi and Jack and Ralph on Golding's island; he talked about what he called 'literature's only excuses,' which he said were exploring the questions of innocence and experience, good and evil. Near the end of this impromptu lecture he mentioned a novel called The Exorcist, which dealt with both these questions ('in the popular context'), and then stopped abruptly. He shook his head as if to clear it.