Hearts in Atlantis(61)

No, he told himself. Not now, you can't. Ted's got enough problems without adding you to the list.

'Bobby?' Ted's voice was clear and sharp. He sounded like a guy with more solutions than problems, and what a relief that was. 'Are you all right?'

'Yeah.' And he thought it was true. His stomach was starting to settle.

'Good. You did well to get her up here. Can you do well a little longer?'

'Yeah.'

'I need a pair of scissors. Can you find one?'

Bobby went into his mother's bedroom, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and got out her wicker sewing basket. Inside was a medium-sized pair of shears. He hurried back into the living room with them and showed them to Ted. 'Are these all right?'

'Fine,' he said, taking them. Then, to Carol: 'I'm going to spoil your blouse, Carol. I'm sorry, but I have to look at your shoulder now and I don't want to hurt you any more than I can help.'

'That's okay,' she said, and again tried to smile. Bobby was a little in awe of her bravery; if his shoulder had looked like that, he probably would have been blatting like a sheep caught in a barbed-wire fence.

'You can wear one of Bobby's shirts home. Can't she, Bobby?'

CHAPTER 12

'Sure, I don't mind a few cooties.'

'Fun-nee,' Carol said.

Working carefully, Ted cut the smock up the back and then up the front. With that done he pulled the two pieces off like the shell of an egg. He was very careful on the left side, but Carol uttered a hoarse scream when Ted's fingers brushed her shoulder. Bobby jumped and his heart, which had been slowing down, began to race again.

'I'm sorry,' Ted murmured. 'Oh my. Look at this.'

Carol's shoulder was ugly, but not as bad as Bobby had feared - perhaps few things were once you were looking right at them. The second shoulder was higher than the normal one, and the skin there was stretched so tight that Bobby didn't understand why it didn't just split open. It had gone a peculiar lilac color, as well.

'How bad is it?' Carol asked. She was looking in the other direction, across the room. Her small face had the pinched, starved look of a UNICEF child. So far as Bobby knew she never looked at her hurt shoulder after that single quick peek. 'I'll be in a cast all summer, won't I?'

'I don't think you're going to be in a cast at all.'

Carol looked up into Ted's face wonderingly.

'It's not broken, child, only dislocated. Someone hit you on the shoulder - '

'Harry Doolin - '

' - and hard enough to knock the top of the bone in your upper left arm out of its socket. I can put it back in, I think. Can you stand one or two moments of quite bad pain if you know things may be all right again afterward?'

'Yes,' she said at once. 'Fix it, Mr Brautigan. Please fix it.'

Bobby looked at him a little doubtfully. 'Can you really do that?'

'Yes. Give me your belt.'

'Huh?'

'Your belt. Give it to me.'

Bobby slipped his belt - a fairly new one he'd gotten for Christmas - out of its loops and handed it to Ted, who took it without ever shifting his eyes from Carol's. 'What's your last name, honey?'

'Gerber. They called me the Gerber Baby, but I'm not a baby.'

'I'm sure you're not. And this is where you prove it.' He got up, settled her in the chair, then knelt before her like a guy in some old movie getting ready to propose. He folded Bobby's belt over twice in his big hands, then poked it at her good hand until she let go of her elbow and closed her fingers over the loops. 'Good. Now put it in your mouth.'

'Put Bobby's belt in my mouth?'

Ted's gaze never left her. He began stroking her unhurt arm from the elbow to the wrist. His fingers trailed down her forearm . . . stopped . . . rose and went back to her elbow . . . trailed down her forearm again. It's like he's hypnotizing her, Bobby thought, but there was really no 'like' about it; Ted was hypnotizing her. His pupils had begun to do that weird thing again, growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking. Their movement and the movement of his fingers were exactly in rhythm. Carol stared into his face, her lips parted.

'Ted . . . your eyes . . . '

'Yes, yes.' He sounded impatient, not very interested in what his eyes were doing. 'Pain rises, Carol, did you know that?'

'No . . . '

Her eyes on his. His fingers on her arm, going down and rising. Going down . . . and rising. His pupils like a slow heartbeat. Bobby could see Carol relaxing in the chair. She was still holding the belt, and when Ted stopped his finger-stroking long enough to touch the back of her hand, she lifted it toward her face with no protest.

'Oh yes,' he said, 'pain rises from its source to the brain. When I put your shoulder back in its socket, there will be a lot of pain - but you'll catch most of it in your mouth as it rises toward your brain. You will bite it with your teeth and hold it against Bobby's belt so that only a little of it can get into your head, which is where things hurt the most. Do you understand me, Carol?'

'Yes . . . ' Her voice had grown distant. She looked very small sitting there in the straight-backed chair, wearing only her shorts and her sneakers. The pupils of Ted's eyes, Bobby noticed, had grown steady again.