Hearts in Atlantis(63)

And Carol and Bobby and Ted Brautigan saw her with that same amazed stop-time clarity: the two black eyes (Liz's right eye was really nothing but a glitter deep in a puffball of discolored flesh); the lower lip which was swelled and split in two places and still wearing flecks of dried blood like old ugly lipstick; the nose which lay askew and had grown a misbegotten hook, making it almost into a caricature Witch Hazel nose.

Silence, a moment's considering silence on a hot summer afternoon. Somewhere a car backfired. Somewhere a kid shouted 'Come on,you guys!' And from behind them on Colony Street came the sound Bobby would identify most strongly with his childhood in general and that Thursday in particular: Mrs O'Hara's Bowser barking his way ever deeper into the twentieth century: roop-roop, roop-roop-roop.

Jack got her, Bobby thought. Jack Merridew and his nimrod friends.

'Oh jeez, what happened?' he asked her, breaking the silence. He didn't want to know; he had to know. He ran to her, starting to cry out of fright but also out of grief: her face, her poor face. She didn't look like his mom at all. She looked like some old woman who belonged not on shady Broad Street but down there, where people drank wine out of bottles in paper sacks and had no last names. 'What did he do? What did that bastard do to you?'

She paid no attention, seemed not to hear him at all. She laid hold of him, though; laid hold of his shoulders hard enough for him to feel her fingers sinking into his flesh, hard enough to hurt. She laid hold and then set him aside without a single look. 'Let her go, you filthy man,' she said in a low and rusty voice. 'Let her go right now.'

'Mrs Garfield, please don't misunderstand.' Ted lifted Carol off his lap - careful even now to keep his hand well away from her hurt shoulder - and then stood up himself. He shook out the legs of his pants, a fussy little gesture that was all Ted. 'She was hurt, you see. Bobby found her - '

'BASTARD!' Liz screamed. To her right was a table with a vase on it. She grabbed the vase and threw it at him. Ted ducked, but too slowly to avoid it completely; the bottom of the vase struck the top of his head, skipped like a stone on a pond, hit the wall and shattered.

Carol screamed.

'Mom, no!' Bobby shouted. 'He didn't do anything bad! He didn't do anything bad!'

Liz took no notice. 'How dare you touch her? Have you been touching my son the same way? You have, haven't you? You don't care which flavor they are, just as long as they're_young!'

Ted took a step toward her. The empty loops of his suspenders swung back and forth beside his legs. Bobby could see blooms of blood in the scant hair on top of his head where the vase had clipped him.

'Mrs Garfield, I assure you - '

'Assure this, you dirty bastard!' With the vase gone there was nothing left on the table and so she picked up the table itself and threw it. It struck Ted in the chest and drove him backward; would have floored him if not for the straight-backed chair. Ted flopped into it, looking at her with wide, incredulous eyes. His mouth was trembling.

'Was he helping you?' Liz asked. Her face was dead white. The bruises on it stood out like birthmarks. 'Did you teach my son to help?'

'Mom, he didn't hurt her!' Bobby shouted. He grabbed her around the waist. 'He didn't hurt her, he - '

She picked him up like the vase, like the table, and he would think later she had been as strong as he had been, carrying Carol up the hill from the park. She threw him across the room. Bobby struck the wall. His head snapped back and connected with the sunburst clock, knocking it to the floor and stopping it forever. Black dots flocked across his vision, making him think briefly and confusedly

(coming closing in now the posters have his name on them)

of the low men. Then he slid to the floor. He tried to stop himself but his knees wouldn't lock.

Liz looked at him, seemingly without much interest, then back at Ted, who sat in the straight-backed chair with the table in his lap and the legs poking at his face. Blood was dripping down one of his cheeks now, and his hair was more red than white. He tried to speak and what came out instead was a dry and flailing old man's cigarette cough.

'Filthy man. Filthy, filthy man. For two cents I'd pull your pants down and yank that filthy thing right off you.' She turned and looked at her huddled son again, and the expression Bobby now saw in the one eye he could really see - the contempt, the accusation - made him cry harder. She didn't say You too, but he saw it in her eye. Then she turned back to Ted.

'Know what? You're going to jail.' She pointed a finger at him, and even through his tears Bobby saw the nail that had been on it when she left in Mr Biderman's Merc was gone; there was a bloody-ragged weal where it had been. Her voice was mushy, seeming to spread out somehow as it crossed her oversized lower lip. 'I'm going to call the police now. If you're wise you'll sit still while I do it. Just keep your mouth shut and sit still.' Her voice was rising, rising. Her hands, scratched and swelled at the knuckles as well as broken at the nails, curled into fists which she shook at him. 'If you run I'll chase you and carve you up with my longest butcher knife. See if I don't. I'll do it right on the street for everyone to see, and I'll start with the part of you that seems to give you . . . you boys . . . so much trouble. So sit still, Brattigan. If you want to live long enough to go to jail, don't you move.'

The phone was on the table by the couch. She went to it. Ted sat with the table in his lap and blood flowing down his cheek. Bobby huddled next to the fallen clock, the one his mother had gotten with trading stamps. Drifting in the window on the breeze of Ted's fan came Bowser's cry: roop-roop-roop.