Hearts in Atlantis(79)

He never saw Ted Brautigan again.

'Bug out, kid,' Len Files said. His face was cheesy-white, seeming to hang off his skull the way the flesh hung off his sister's upper arms. Behind him the lights of the Gottlieb machines in the little arcade flashed and flickered with no one to watch them; the cool cats who made an evening specialty of Corner Pocket pinball were clustered behind Len Files like children. To Len's right were the pool and billiard players, many of them clutching cues like clubs. Old Gee stood off to one side by the cigarette machine. He didn't have a pool-cue; from one gnarled old hand there hung a small automatic pistol. It didn't scare Bobby. After Cam and his yellowcoat friends, he didn't think anything would have the power to scare him right now. For the time being he was all scared out.

'Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, kid. Now.'

'Better do it, kiddo.' That was Alanna, standing behind the desk. Bobby glanced at her and thought, If I was older I bet I'd give you something. I bet I would. She saw his glance - the quality of his glance - and looked away, flushed and frightened and confused.

Bobby looked back at her brother. 'You want those guys back here?'

Len's hanging face grew even longer. 'You kidding?'

'Okay, then,' Bobby said. 'Give me what I want and I'll go away. You'll never see me again.' He paused. 'Or them.'

'Whatchu want, kid?' Old Gee asked in his wavering voice. Bobby was going to get whatever he asked for; it was flashing in Old Gee's mind like a big bright sign. That mind was as clear now as it had been when it had belonged to Young Gee, cold and calculating and unpleasant, but it seemed innocent after Cam and his regulators. Innocent as ice cream.

'A ride home,' Bobby said. 'That's number one.' Then - speaking to Old Gee rather than Len - he gave them number two.

Len's car was a Buick: big, long, and new. Vulgar but not low. Just a car. The two of them rode to the sound of danceband music from the forties. Len spoke only once during the trip to Harwich. 'Don't you go tuning that to no rock and roll. I have to listen to enough of that shit at work.'

They drove past the Asher Empire, and Bobby saw there was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Brigitte Bardot standing to the left of the ticket booth. He glanced at it without very much interest. He felt too old for B.B. now.

They turned off Asher; the Buick slipped down Broad Street Hill like a whisper behind a cupped hand. Bobby pointed out his building. Now the apartment was lit up, all right; every light was blazing. Bobby looked at the clock on the Buick's dashboard and saw it was almost eleven P.M.

As the Buick pulled to the curb Len Files found his tongue again. 'Who were they, kid? Who were those gonifs?'

Bobby almost grinned. It reminded him of how, at the end of almost every Lone Ranger episode, someone said Who was that masked man?

'Low men,' he told Len. 'Low men in yellow coats.'

'I wouldn't want to be your pal right now.'

'No,' Bobby said. A shudder shook through him like a gust of wind. 'Me neither. Thanks for the ride.'

'Don't mention it. Just stay the f**k clear of my felts and greens from now on. You're banned for life.'

The Buick - a boat, a Detroit cabin-cruiser, but not low - drew away. Bobby watched as it turned in a driveway across the street and then headed back up the hill past Carol's building. When it had disappeared around the corner, Bobby looked up at the stars -stacked billions, a spilled bridge of light. Stars and more stars beyond them, spinning in the black.

There is a Tower, he thought. It holds everything together. There are Beams that protect it somehow. There is a Crimson King, and Breakers working to destroy the Beams . . . not because the Breakers want to but because it wants them to. The Crimson King.

Was Ted back among the rest of the Breakers yet? Bobby wondered. Back and pulling his oar?

I'm sorry, he thought, starting up the walk to the porch. He remembered sitting there with Ted, reading to him from the newspaper. Just a couple of guys. I wanted to go with you but I couldn't. In the end I couldn't.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, listening for Bowser around on Colony Street. There was nothing. Bowser had gone to sleep. It was a miracle. Smiling wanly, Bobby got moving again. His mother must have heard the creak of the second porch step -it was pretty loud - because she cried out his name and then there was the sound of her running footsteps. He was on the porch when the door flew open and she ran out, still dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she came home from Providence. Her hair hung around her face in wild curls and tangles.

'Bobby!' she cried. 'Bobby, oh Bobby! Thank God! Thank God!'

She swept him up, turning him around and around in a kind of dance, her tears wetting one side of his face.

'I wouldn't take their money,' she babbled. 'They called me back and asked for the address so they could send a check and I said never mind, it was a mistake, I was hurt and upset, I said no, Bobby, I said no, I said I didn't want their money.'

Bobby saw she was lying. Someone had pushed an envelope with her name on it under the foyer door. Not a check, three hundred dollars in cash. Three hundred dollars for the return of their best Breaker; three hundred lousy rocks. They were even bigger cheapskates than she was.

'I said I didn't want it, did you hear me?'

Carrying him into the apartment now. He weighed almost a hundred pounds and was too heavy for her but she carried him anyway. As she babbled on, Bobby realized they wouldn't have the police to contend with, at least; she hadn't called them. Mostly she had just been sitting here, plucking at her wrinkled skirt and praying incoherently that he would come home. She loved him. That beat in her mind like the wings of a bird trapped in a barn. She loved him. It didn't help much . . . but it helped a little. Even if it was a trap, it helped a little.